The Roar
by CelticFeather
Summary: After one world war and before another, it seems the citizens of the world have all met in one place. New York, New York, 1929. In a world torn between old and new, teetering between Fascism and Communism, and alcohol prohibition stopping no one, trouble is sure to ensue. Historic Hetalia. Semi-Pruhun.
1. Chapter 1

What a splendid time to be alive. A bottle of Coca Cola was a nickel, a family could buy a Ford for 490 bucks, zeppelins and Lindbergh were crossing the Northern hemisphere, and women on the street were –dare he utter it- showing their ankles. What a swell time indeed.

Every time Sergeant Alfred F. Jones walked Times Square in New York City he had this feeling. The flashing lights, the big cigarette advertisements, that poor, poor, traffic light in the middle of the intersection that tried too hard at its job. Sometimes he would imagine he was a foreign tourist, or some time traveled cowboy from the 1800s, and he was seeing his city for the first time.

Out of the corner of his eye Alfred noticed something that instinct had instilled in him and fellow policemen to notice: idiots. Some mentally impaired dolt was standing at the intersection, gawking at the lights, like he really was some old coot out of the past. About to get splattered into a bloody mural by an old Model T.

Forget the Scopes Trial, Lady Darwin had _somewhat_ of a place in keeping idiots off the streets. Like the crack of a whip Alfred sprang, his stride long, lopsided by the heavy Colt pistol holstered on his right hip. The contrasting gleam of his gold badge on the almost black fabric of his uniform easily parted the crowds of people.

"Hey you! _MOVE!" _Alfred snatched roughly at the man's lapels and pulled him clumsily back up onto the curb before a car shrieked by. The young man, startled, but realizing of his mistake, stared at him with wide blue eyes.

"Entschuldigen Sie bi… I-"

"What the hell were you doing?" Alfred asked, adrenaline toning his voice.

"I..I…"

Alfred understood the situation now. Looking like he'd never seen so many lights before. He knew this type. _I smell you. Fresh off the boat._

The man seemed horrified. He quickly started pawing about on his person. "You say I smell like a boat?"

He hadn't meant to say that out loud. But the person did speak English. Well, he couldn't be too bad. For an Irish-Jewish-Italian-Polish-Greek-Russian whatever he was. "No, you don't really smell like vomit," Alfred appeased.

The young man did not seem pleased with this, and continued looking confusedly about on his person. "Easy," Alfred soothed, almost apologetically. "Where are you from?"

"Berlin."

"Ah! Good old kraut. Well, if you speak English, and you're not here to start a war, I say you'll do just swell. What you here for?"

He didn't answer. Perhaps he already had some sort of occupation lined up. Though most likely not, most people's reasons for leaving were similar.

"Whoo, you can say that again. There's a bunch of you here. Your whole government is collapsing. Egg worth a kabillion marks? That coup Whatzisname threw a bit back. Jailed the bastard, didn't they?" Alfred started walking out of the square and encouraged the stranger to walk with him.

"Yes, but the judge was rather sympathetic. He was only to serve a few years."

"Mm. Anyway, shouldn't be too hard for you to find work. See those signs in the shop places? Dunno how well you can read em. They say 'if Irish or Italian, you need not apply.' The only immigrants we really like are the English. I guess the Germans are alright, hard workers, they are. When you're not trying to start a war, I mean."

"What ethnicity are you? Certainly you must be some of those things," the man said.

"Oh sure!" Alfred replied warmly. He jerked a curved thumb to the hollow of his collarbone. "Make no mistake about it, I'm made out of boat peasants too! Old 17th century puritans and gold hunters. Probably English, Scots-Irish, Dutch, maybe some German. But my ancestors came here earlier. And unlike 60% of this city, I get to say I'm a natural born American."

"And better to everyone else."

Alfred was generous enough to pretend not to hear. He stooped low in his stride to pick up a newspaper someone had dropped, he disliked litter. Stocks were up today, according to the headline. "You got a wife back home you're sending the dollars back to? Got family in town?"

"Well, supposedly my idiot brother got on the wrong boat in the Netherlands and ended up here."

"Awuh!" Alfred chuckled. "Don't worry. If he's that stupid, he's probably already dead."

That quip didn't much seem to comfort him. It would be hard enough to find someone in this city already without having to check the morgue. The German sighed and placed a palm to his brow. "I need a drink. Do you know of a place?"

"Sure do."

Alfred started unhooking the handcuffs from his belt. Eyes wide, the German danced quickly back with an athletic military swiftness that almost made Alfred hesitate in his confidence he could subdue him. "What are you…?!"

"Here's a hint, Jerry ol' pal. Don't try the Oktoberfest here. I'll have your ass in the glasshouse before you can even say 'bitte!'" Alfred warned.

"I apologize!"

That was Sergeant Jones's job. Bust the speakeasies and the kneecaps of every gangster on Manhattan Island. He had earned a reputation as unbribeable, and was on the death list of the Italian mob because of it. But Alfred had never been outgunned yet, and never planned to.

"Alcohol is illegal here, and getting involved with it will get you in bad company. So I suggest you get used to life without it."

"S-sorry. I had forgotten."

"Yeah well, I can't arrest you just for talking about it. There's little Germany down on the lower east side, why don't you go make some friends?" Alfred pointed northeast. Likely not knowing what or where the lower east side was, the man inclined his head, and quickly left.

* * *

-Elizabeta Héderváry-

It had been a long night, and Elizabeta was counting her money. She wasn't sure who most of the people on the coins were, but as far as she was concerned they were her good friends. There was Indian Head, Little Brown Beard, and Round Glasses. With most of the coins it seemed the artist had ran out of creativity by the back side, and just drew an eagle or an American bison with a large penis. The big silver coin with the Roman goddess was her favorite. A quarter. She was the only female on any of the currency. Fairly plentiful, beautiful, armed and armored, the decent amount the woman was worth made her quite respectable in Elizabeta's eyes.

There was a saying she had heard. It was by Italian immigrants in origin, but she found it applicable enough._ 'One, the roads are not paved in gold. Two, they're not paved at all. And three, you have to pave them.'_

"Aren't you out a little late?" the strange voice that disturbed her then wasn't in English. In this part of town, perhaps he thought he could get away with it.

But she recognized the language and responded anyway. It was generally the second one taught to children in her country since the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. "Was just about to head out," she replied in German, packing up her day's earnings without looking at him. "The next job."

"Streetwalking, perhaps? I wouldn't mind a go."

A wave of indigence lanced through her at the suggestion, but she refused it to manifest in more than a stiffening of her eyebrows. "I'm a fortune teller."

She had been sure a minute ago the light filtering though the brownstones had been rosy, but the sky had unarguably shifted into the night spectrum. Hazy halos of orange light blurred around distant streetlamps, like fire through dirty glass, and the streets were deserted besides her and her newest visitor.

He extended his palm with a beautiful smile. "Well, tell me my fortune, pretty woman."

What a snake. She dropped the hand unceremoniously. "You're going to die young."

"Woe!" Stricken, the stranger grasped his heart, leaned back, and started spinning around in exaggerated death thoes. Upon seeing no humored reaction from her, he stopped and sauntered closer to her, placing his meaty knuckles on her tablecloth. She felt an irritation bloom in her breast, she had given him no permission to do that. He leaned close, his hair veiling over his eyes and his voice soft over chapped lips. "I've heard that one before. I think I want my money back."

"You never paid," she replied.

"Typical gypsy. Hiding the evidence."

"Actually, I'm catholic. But the people in this country don't seem to know what 'Hungry' is other than a condition of the stomach. So the Roma guise works out fine for me."

"We have something in common. I haven't found an American who can tell East Prussia apart from Lithuania. Not that I've asked many. Accent pretty bad over the English, y'see," he cooed.

"East Prussia..." she droned. "Is that a Polish island?"

She knew getting on the nerves of a man who was obviously trying to mug her may not have been the most intelligent route. But submission to other variants of street scum was simply against her nature.

"Madame, I would calmly request a refund to your services. Why, you barely even looked at my palm," he said sweetly, his fluctuating tone lowering pleasantly. He held his upturned hand to her, and from behind his back with the other, unsheathed a large knife.

"You should be ashamed, doing this to a woman," she hissed.

"Not particularly."

"Put that away," she ordered.

"No."

She sighed. Impatiently, the mugger flipped the knife in his hand, spinning it on his fingers before halting it and pointing it at her throat. He seemed to be pretty deft with it.

"Sir, the one good thing about this country," she trailed with an air of calm nobility, slowly sneaking her hand into the compartment under the table, "Is guns galore."

She stood, and jostled the Luger pistol in her hand, letting the rosy streetlight reflect along the barrel. She saw the man's face drain of any small amount of color it had. "Now how much do you want to bet that telling was inaccurate?"

* * *

Author's note:

Hello! Hopefully someone from my past is around to read this. I was starting to miss fanfiction. I had this story idea around for a few months but was nervous to get started. After accumulating a decent amount of research notes and drafts, I thought I'd release the first bit.

Hoping to hear from some old friends and some new ones,

CelticFeather


	2. Chapter 2

-Gilbert Beilschmidt-

Fool, what did she think would happen when she pointed that gun at someone? He did not want anyone to die. In an instant Gilbert flipped the frail folding table over, the fakely rich red and gold Egyptian tablecloth flourishing like a matador's veil into the air before him, preventing the visibility of an aimed shot. With sheer force of momentum he charged forward, pinning the woman like a shadow against the bricks. He gripped her narrow wrist that held the gun and plunged his thumbnail between the strained white ligaments that tensed above her pulse until it clattered to the ground.

In an awful swift jab, her fingers stabbed at the tender muscle beneath his armpit, and he released her reflexively. And with astonishing flexibility and a slightly heeled boot she kicked him in the stomach and sent him somehow on the concrete. Before he fell he grabbed her calf and yanked her down too with a yowl of protest. Frankly, he was surprised she didn't just yell 'rape' and put an end to this charade.

But he was not so merciful to that small kindness, and righted himself, pinning her shoulders, and they tangled like hounds in the alley. She was remarkably strong for a female, but of course a woman simply couldn't hope to win against a man like him.

"Gilbert?!"

"Howdya know my name, little wretch? You psychic after all?"

Her teeth clacked before his nose in response. He realized then it was not she that had spoken. In fact, the noise came from behind him, and his head flicked up. Leaving a clear shot for the fake gypsy to uppercut him across the chin with the back of the pistol. Sprawled on his back, pressing into the damp gravelly sidewalk, vision spinning, he heard the voice again.

"Miss, was this man bothering you?"

"Yes!" the witch panted eagerly in her strange Bavarian German, probably what she heard most in her country. The voice's silhouetted owner was gently helping her up by one hand, while next to him she had the appearance of a rabid stray cat with her wild, rotted squash green eyes and strewn mud colored hair. "He sure was!"

The stranger was tall, dark of essence, but silhouetted by the coppery glow of a distant street lamp to hide its features. Its swept hair glowed golden on the perimeter of its scalp and the clothes were formal but worn. It was tall with a broad triangular torso with strong storklike legs, though like a teenager not quite as well fitted. Light reflected off wide angles on the cheeks.

"Ludwig?" Gilbert exclaimed. He uncoiled himself from his puddle of limbs, woman forgotten. He had not seen the other in two years.

Ludwig was helping the woman up, but he had nearly dropped her. "I didn't expect to find you so soon!"

So soon? He had been looking for him? Away from Ludwig's line of sight, Gilbert slipped the knife discreetly back into his boot. "What are you doing here?"

Wild with excitement, two men clumsily drew themselves suddenly together, inspecting the other. Gilbert grasped his shoulders and beamed with quiet pride upon how tall Ludwig had become. Ludwig shifted wordlessly, helplessly; guiltily in the way of an honest teenager who had done something menially wrong. Gilbert knew then that Ludwig had not come across the world to tell him a family member had died. He'd probably run away from home because he accidentally trod past a 'do not walk on grass' sign and thought he had to flee the country. Gilbert would find out when he was ready to tell.

Ludwig disclosed then quietly he had no place to stay, and with the showmanship of a circus ringleader Gilbert ushered him grandly to accompany him. The lair was just a short walk away. Sometime during this the woman had fled and Gilbert didn't so much care about the lowly gypsy anyway. Ludwig was here.

* * *

-Ludwig Beilschmidt-

From Gilbert's mouth flowed an unceasing river of queries as they walked the silent streets. If Ludwig had been eating well. If he'd had any girlfriends. Or even had any ordinary friends. Gilbert was like a mother hen in that sense. A very big, loud, nasally, obnoxious, absinthe drinking, doting mother hen. He had led him to a section of the city that looked nothing like what he had seen at Times Square, it was lined with run down, brown stoned buildings only about four stories tall, to a tenement building. Calling it an apartment was generous. It was a single room, perhaps as big as four automobiles- if one could pack motor cars like sardines. It reeked of pine, tobacco, sweat, and what might have been sex. It was run down, but impeccably organized. It had a stove along the wall, a cheap sink, a rickety table, and a window with a beautiful view of the fire escape. The room had one prominent inhabitant.

"Your bed takes up half of your room," Ludwig noted. It seemed to be the one extravagance Gilbert had allowed himself.

"Yeah well, don't ask why. Good news is we can both sleep in it."

Exhausted, the younger brother took his cue and sat down on the mattress. It groaned under his weight and his fingers wove their way though his thin hair and pressed upon the cool bone of his temples, then wandered to his nose to pinch the artery between his eyes.

"You look terrible," Gilbert voiced abruptly.

"Thanks."

"First thing in the morning I'm gonna take you out and get you some good German food. But for now, have a beer."

Ludwig took what Gilbert had unsheathed from the icebox and stared at the beer bottle incredulously. Condensation was beading on the thick amber glass and he wiped it clean with his fingers to see if it was really true. "Where did you get this?"

"Oh it's easy if you know the right people. Cheaper than it would be if it were legal, too."

Ludwig nodded his assent and drank. Apparently that strange, helpful, slightly racist police officer had a lot on his plate. Gilbert sat down next to him. "But it's American, has an alcohol content of .0001%, tastes like ram piss, and might make your legs stop working."

"Great."

"No I'm serious about that leg not working thing. Some of the homemade moonshine is water and formaldehyde. Causes paralysis or somethin."

"Will do." At least their corpses would be pristine. Gilbert started ruffling out some spare, slightly stale looking bread he had and handed him some.

Ludwig wasn't sure what Gilbert had been doing before, when he encountered him in the street. He was looking for a place to stay for the night and had walked in on the incident half through. He had a feeling Gilbert had not merely tripped while helping that elaborately dressed woman cross the sidewalk and they both ended up on the concrete. But since he was in his apartment now, and Gilbert was paying rent, Ludwig decided he would keep his mouth shut for five whole minutes before trying to correct his brother into a proper citizen.

"What do you do here?" Ludwig asked.

"Oh you know, handyman things. Odd jobs. Some of which not particularly legal. But you don't have to do that if you don't want."

"I think I'd like something steadier."

"Good, good! You speak English, right? I tell ya, you've gotta tutor me. Whenever I step on someone's foot I keep saying 'you're welcome' instead of 'excuse me.' It's gotten me punched in the Schnauze a couple times."

"I'll help you. The grammar is not hard. It is the spelling that is difficult."

"Tsch. Yeah, apparently these simple brutes don't have three different words for _the_."

Perched stockily on Gilbert's table, sandwiched between a salt and pepper shaker, Ludwig noticed an old Pickelhaube. The old, imperial Prussian hussar design of the war helmet looked out of place with its current tabletop dwelling and the city lights outside. A relic from some time before his own, Ludwig paced over and traced the silver designs and shiny black boiled leather with quiet reverence. He raised the Pickelhaube delicately up with the tips of his fingers and placed it over his own head. He looked at his reflection at a shaving mirror on the wall.

"Lookin' sharp Lud."

Ludwig rolled his eyes at his brother's pun. The helmet must have weighed three kilos and he felt his neck compress under the weight. No wonder it had performed so poorly in the trenches. And that was if one did not accidentally stab himself with it. He rubbed the back of his neck and took it off his head, slowly tracing the metal eagle embellished on the front.

"Father let you bring his Pickelhaube here?" he asked.

"He gave it to me, woulda thought I could do what I want with it."

"I'm surprised they even let you bring it in this country. I would think they'd confiscate it in customs or something," Ludwig said, returning the war helmet to its home in the middle of the table. Probably their father would have thought such a possession to be kept in their own country, not for Gilbert to bring it on whatever vacations he had planned.

"Why are you here instead of school?" Gilbert asked.

"I ran out of money."

"So you dropped out and bought a boat ticket here?"

"Yes," Ludwig answered guiltily. "I wanted to find you."

Gilbert snorted something then. It might have been 'idiot.' Ludwig pretended not to wince.

Gilbert had left their home town some years ago without a word to their parents. Ludwig was in his first year at university in Berlin in pursuit of an engineering degree. Things had been well until a few weeks ago. Ludwig stopped playing with the helmet.

"Everything here is just so strange. The women wear their hair short. The drinking rules. The diversity. The jazz music... I do not understand why you came somewhere so different," he questioned.

Gilbert stood then and raised his chin smartly. "Here's the thing: in Germany, if you work, you get no money. But in America, in _some_ demented way, if you work, you get money."

Ludwig looked around at Gilbert's scant apartment. The leak stains on the ceiling, the mouse holes in the molding. Maybe Gilbert was saving it all, it had to be true, all of these people certainly would not go to the states if there was no fortune to be had.

"Now you better get some rest," Gilbert said. "Tomorrow I'm gonna show you around and you better be awake."

* * *

Gilbert was whistling as he walked, his long legs fully extending as his heel struck the ground and his arms swinging easily as he stepped. He supposed everyone knew someone like that, with the really loud hearty whistle. Gilbert was one of these. The sound rang vibrant and low, flutelike, from his pursed lips. Some familiar birdlike song that reminded him of youth, of Germany, perhaps some melody his mother had murmured when he was a child. He wasn't sure how, but Gilbert was smiling liplessy when he did it, just with his dark eyes somehow and the way his wide rosed cheekbones rounded beneath his lashes.

He was also surprised to find that he had surpassed Gilbert in height, even though Gilbert was wearing his big black boots as always.

"Your boots..."

"What bout em?" Gilbert said, glancing back at his brother.

"You're just a big boot kind of person. They suit you. I'm glad that you kept them."

Gilbert smirked evilly at some thought Ludwig did not know. "You wear big boots in New York City today for different reasons, dear brother."

Gilbert had insisted on giving him a tour of the island and the social rundown of who not to piss off. He had named several important people, street gangs, and drew him a crude map of the city in charcoal on a piece of fishwrap. Apparently they lived on this pointed island called Manhattan, bought from Indians by a Dutchman for two dollars worth of glass beads, 'where all the important stuff is.' It was surrounded by four other boroughs nearby, some across the water that were not particularly notable. Gilbert's finger jabbed at the paper in inconclusive arcs. 'Jews live here, blacks here, Italians, Russians, Poles, toxic fumes, good pierogi...'

Ludwig liked what he had seen of America. The lights, the excitement was beyond what he had seen at home. The Statue of Liberty had been smaller than he imagined, and as any city there were beggars and dirt. But as cultures went, America was not so terribly different than Germany. The people looked about the same, dressed the same, seemed hard working. A bit more friendly and a bit less educated, but they did not seem so bad. He bet if he did not speak, he thought he might even pass for one.

"Is it safe to point these things out to me?" Ludwig asked. "I feel like such a tourist."

"Quite so! Ain't gotta watch out for pickpockets in America."

"Really?"

"Yeah, they just don't have em. Not like Europe at least."

"That's wonderful!"

"Now mass shootings. That's what you gotta watch out for."

"WHAT."

"Don't worry you'll be fiiiine. Doesn't happen thaaat much."

Gilbert spoke a strange river. There was his swampy northern German, fluctuating somewhere between Königsberg and Berlin, of which Ludwig spoke similarly, but Gilbert every once in a while inputted an odd splattering of English slang he had learned somewhere. Ludwig wished Gilbert spoke one or the other, he couldn't understand both. Denglisch_,_ Gilbert had called it jokingly.

The landscape itself was similar and different from Berlin, Ludwig noted as he passed another gray building. Climate was similar: both gray and damp. Autumn seemed in similar stages of progression. Both had veterans in their thirties hobbling around without a limb, though just one here for every twenty he would see home.

"Aha!" Gilbert's cry broke him from his thoughts. "Welcome to the heart of The World!"

"The World?" Ludwig echoed. Gilbert had brought him to what looked like the trashiest part of the city. Suddenly, he realized he understood nothing of the language that was being spoken by people walking around them. There was someone selling French breads, another with Polish sausages.

"Yes, I call this The World. Because that's what it is. You'll find a person from every country here, each have their own little blocks. We live in a pretty German part, on the western edge. Italy and Poland have very strong ones. Russia too. There's even an Orient if you go south far enough! You ever seen a Japanese before?"

Ludwig shook his head.

"You see, there were once many Germans in this city. So many that Germans from different states wouldn't even want to live on the same streets as each other. But in recent decades it's been slightly less shitty in Germany than in some other countries, and less need to move, so you'll notice here we Teutons are something of a dying breed. Maybe only half of our block speaks it as a first language."

_Only _half_?_ Ludwig thought astonishedly. He wouldn't find a block of random English speaking immigrants in Berlin. What a bizarre country.

"That's called the flatiron building," he said, pointing to a tall building with a triangular base and rounded edges, clad in gray cement blocks.

"Strange title for a building."

"Yeah. Kinda, y'know, cuz it's shaped like a flatiron. Whodathunk it," said Gilbert without the slightest iota of sarcasm.

"I like this one," Ludwig said.

Gilbert rolled his eyes. "And here's the Chrysler building. That's a car here, and it's starting to get one up on Ford because Mr. Chrysler will actually bother to paint them not all black. Looks straight out of _Metropolis_, doesn't it?"

Ludwig nodded. It was arched and pointed with curved glass windows like a church steeple. It did look like to him like a futuristic film set.

"Ah!" Gilbert was bouncing with excitement. "See this thing here?"

Ludwig blinked. This house-high pile of metal beams, scaffolding, and unshaven migrant workers?

"This is gonna be the biggest thing since Wonder Bread! It's going to be the tallest building in the world, they say! A hundred floors and seventy lifts! Gonna call it 'The Empire State Building.'"

"Scary name," Ludwig noted.

"I know. Makes me think America's gonna try to form an empire and take over the world."

It stuck up from the ground like a half smoked cigarette. It was whitish at the bottom, but towards the top was just a skeleton of brown steel bars. A construction worker at the floor was crouched on a lump of metal, long blond hair tied back, and elbow on his knee, smoking an actual cigarette. He flipped his hair behind one shoulder and observed Ludwig aloofly, and the German averted his eyes. Gilbert must have decided then Ludwig was informed enough and scary enough to go out on his own, because he gave his brother some money and told him to go out and explore.

* * *

When Ludwig came home, Gilbert was there too. It had been half a week since Gilbert had first taken him out and he was slowly getting used to things. Mostly in his free time Ludwig read in the library, or watched families play with their dogs in the park. At least Gilbert was home this time though. Often the elder was out doing something.

The last few days, after the honeymoon period of being perfect when his brother had arrived, Gilbert's sleeping patterns had become abnormally nocturnal. The elder would sleep but quietly stir awake in the night, sometimes at 2 a.m., and leave for several hours into the blackness before coming back. He did not do much other day work and he knew he must have been making money from it somehow. Most mysterious, if he left with anything or came back with anything new, Ludwig never saw it. In some brother code he knew better than to ask.

Today the cool October sun was shining through the window and Gilbert was sitting at his little table, his feet propped up on the adjacent stool, spread before him was the _Staats Zeitung_, -a German language newspaper- and balanced royally in Gilbert's fingers was a spoon he proceeded to lick.

"Hey, yew thould thry this shtuff I found."

Ludwig closed the door behind him. "What on earth is that smell?"

"Pee nut butt her."

Ludwig hesitated in thought. _"Peanut butter?"_

"Yesh, that sounds right! I just dithcovered it today. D'you want some? It's amazing!"

There was a little glass jar of brownish something on the table he had never seen before. Ludwig watched as Gilbert stabbed a spoon in the thick substance, stuck out his tongue, and slurped the pewter clean. Though Ludwig doubted there would be much left for him to be contaminated, Gilbert was determined in using a clean spoon every time and kept washing them in the sink. Which Ludwig thought was pretty funny, because they only owned three spoons.

"...Do you want to spread it on toast or something?"

Gilbert offered his best glare. "Why would I ruin it with toast?"

Ludwig shifted and sat beside him. "I have some news."

"Mhm." Gilbert was examining the spoon for the best angle of attack. "Could you buy some milk by the way, I drank all of ours."

Much as he appreciated being upstaged by a jar of peanut butter, Ludwig interrupted, "I got a job."

"What? Really?"

"Yes! I walked in there, that huge Wall Street place with the columns, it looked like a tornado blew through there. I walked up to a man when it died down and asked if he needed help. He said the market has been so up and down lately he needed someone. I assumed he meant cleaning the floors, but I made a comment on a trend on some numbers on the board, and he had me doing real stuff!"

"That's stupendous! Handsome smart kid like you, I knew you'd get somewhere." Gilbert shook his head. "Shucks, kid. You've only been here a few days. I didn't say you had to work yet."

All Ludwig had been doing was eating Gilbert's food, sleeping in his bed, and using his time when it was clear Gilbert already lived in poverty. He owed it to him to try and not be a parasite. "It bores me doing nothing," Ludwig said.

"Come, come!" Gilbert had closed the peanut butter and was already donning his coat, "let's get you a new suit. Can't have you making us look bad traipsing around the finance district in _that_ thing. You think they know you're...?"

"Oh, probably. Americans can smell the foreignness just on how I mispronounce the letter W. But he didn't seem to care. It's not engineering, but I'm good with math too and I know how to work an adding machine. And at the end of the day they give me a few dollars!"

* * *

-Gilbert Beilschmidt-

Ludwig's work had been well enough. Gilbert wasn't really sure what the brother had done the last few days, something people who were good at math did and bet on the market or something. Really, Gilbert was out on the town looking for his favorite pretzel vendor. And he was damn almost there when he had stopped in his tracks.

It had been over a week since he'd seen her last. She must have picked a new spot. He wondered, stiffening with guilt, if he should just get out of there and pretend not to see her. She was with someone, her distant figure interrupted as people passed between them. She seemed happy, gesturing with her hands, her lips moving soundlessly. The man, _the victim_, some doughy chinless sort in his thirties, nodded, entranced, like a dumb circus seal. He was trembling with gratitude and thanked her for the deceit with a grayish green bill.

He evaluated himself on what he could possibly gain from talking to her. He did not remember making the command, but he found himself before the woman's table. He put his knuckles upon it, slouched, and felt upon his face the cold stretch of a sharklike grin. "Howdy partner," he drawled in his finest American accent.

She stared at him for a moment, eyes confused and searching. Then in recognition, like the wings of a brown seagull, her brows creased into a threatening V. "_I'll get the police."_

"No need for that, I just want to know my fortune," he said as innocently as a Gilbert Beilschmidt could. She should have been smart enough to know only an idiot would try any tricks with this many people around.

"Doesn't mean I want to deal with you, Prussian Pig."

"So firm?" he chastised in a tone high with false hurt. "I'm only a weary traveler who wants to know his fortune."

She looked him in the eye and regarded him with a degree of honesty he did not deserve. "You know it's not real."

"Well, go through the motions anyway for me."

"Got a dollar?"

"Like hell! Jew. You just admitted it's hocus pocus and you want money anyway? A whole dollar? I'd go to a restaurant with that." He muttered again. "A whole _dollar._ Greedy gypsy."

"You're using time in which somebody paying could occupy," she replied reasonably.

He gave her a quarter. She could take the rest out of the histrionics.

She took his palm in her tapered fingers, and with tightly pressed lips her nails began pensively tracing the wrinkles in it. "And when were you born?"

"January 18."

"Hm, just barely a Capricorn."

"Heathen," he muttered.

"Well," she announced pensively. She folded his left hand in both of hers, both of her thumbs ghosting above it like the forked tongue of a snake. "Your life line isn't particularly long," she said.

"Oh, lay off it already."

"Your head line is remarkably twisted.

"The marriage line is very dotted. You're to be divorced thrice.

"Ah, this one says you're stupid.

"This freckle here means you're greedy.

She began to assign meanings to other things. "Gluttonous. Prideful. Sinful. Lecherous. Sexist. Manipulative. Enjoys torturing animals. Likes to take advantage of people smaller than you."

"And what is this?"  
Tired of her caustic assault and eager to stump her, the finger of his right hand jabbed down on a plain part of his hand, one with no lines or wrinkles to pick apart. That simple fleshly muscle that connected his thumb to his palm.

"It's..." She paused as she tried to conjure some seldom used astrology term from her memory. "That is called your Venus Mound."

The lady knew her stuff for claiming to not believe in her own philosophy. He didn't know what a Venus Mound was. Not on a hand, at least. He eyed the featureless little triangle of whitish pink meat with suspicion. "Yeah, what's it say?"

"It's just a muscle that's very prominent in you. Probably you do a lot of labor or often work with your hands."

Her avoiding of the question stirred something instinctive to hunt an answer. "What is the symbolism?"

"This part of your hand is very strong. It represents, well, the feeling of l..." she looked nervously around, as if looking for a way to escape explaining sex to a slow child. "You _know_ what Venus was supposedly the goddess of."

"I didn't graduate gymnasium," he said in blasé explanation. He never wasted his time reading the Iliad or whatever Greeks or Romans or Egyptians or writing of whatever Venus belonged to. What did he look like, some shiny university kid like Ludwig? He barely happened to remember Venus was a planet.

Her eyes flickered, and her cheeks were red, perhaps debating to tell him, but instead focused on a shadow behind him. "Go," she said. "Someone is here and that's about as far as a quarter will get you."

He felt strangely offended, cast away so unceremoniously after they had almost gotten along. He was no less trash than she was. If the little harlot was too thick headed to recognize this apology of his, he wanted null to do with her. He was not some dog whimpering to strangers for forgiveness when they were idiotic enough to count their money alone at night. He lifted his chin like an Egyptian pharaoh, closed his eyes regally, and stalked away.

He should be happy! The sun was shining. Leaves were scuttling and his boots were empty of everything but his feet. Ludwig was off doing his thing. The little gypsy had to do her disgraceful practice, but Gilbert didn't have to work today: he was free as a bird. This part of town, -Wall Street it was named for some stupid reason even though there was no wall- had been unusually crowded the last week, and though he had no idea what was going on, there was something exciting about the bustle. Probably the Yankees had beaten those with the red socks in that one game they played.

He still needed a pretzel._ Could have bought three with the quarter you gave that street urchin,_ the voice in his head added sardonically. He marched down the street, impatiently pushing aside the bumbling people who weren't business minded enough to know where they were going. But he had sensed something wrong and stopped. He heard a man's low scream, and someone who wasn't before him a second ago, was in front of him now.

"Shit!" Gilbert screeched, jumping back. The person had landed with a bodily thump on the pavement some ten feet before him. He must have fallen out of a window. He flipped him over as carefully as he could.

"You are alright?" he said in his best English.

The man's eyelids fluttered. He wore a pressed suit that smelled of sweat and business and the most expensive tie Gilbert had ever seen. Blood trickled out of his mouth, and his neck was twisted at an odd angle. His face was red with effort and clustered in his brown eyelashes were tears. Gilbert quickly held two fingers to the man's throat.

"Mein Gott... Du bist tot!

He withdrew his fingers sharply. A different sound. Tiny flecks of glass falling like ice from bare branches. To only be hitting the ground now he must have been pushed from very high. He looked up to see a hole in one of the building's windows. At that moment, the huge clock struck three and the street was beginning to flood with more people than he had ever seen in one place. Men and women, middle classed, in their fancy hats suits and fox furs swarming around, gibbering panicked useless garbage.

Was this a dream? Ludwig said he worked somewhere here. There was a dead body at his feet. Deciding something was horribly, terribly wrong, Gilbert decided to run. He'd find help. Yes, that's what he'd do. Find the police.

Somewhere walking toward with suspicious curiosity and not nearly enough swiftness was the blue black uniform of a police officer. Gilbert halted before him and the blue eyes appraised him aloofly. He wasn't sure what to say, he hoped what spewed out of his mouth was close enough.

"Officer, you must quickly come! It gives something going off in that big building there, a robbery or hostage thing or something! They throw the peoples aus the windows!"

"Where?"

_"The stock exchange!"_

They ran, Gilbert with a certain litheness, and the officer cleared his way with his chin and shoulder pointed with duty, tearing through slow swarms of spectators that had begun to gather. The officer stopped before the building with the big columns, his chin tipped up, blue eyes wide with awe, his lips moving soundlessly. Gilbert looked at him with searching eyes, hoping he would look back and offer some explanation he could understand. The policeman looked at the hundreds of people that had gathered, some six deep in front of certain buildings, removed his cap, crossed himself, and ran towards the station.

Abandoned, Gilbert stood in deliberation, wondering if he should run toward the place or away. A trim little blond man cut him off as he stepped agilely down the stairs to the building, a fat one tottering in tow. "Come Mr. Churchill, this way now."

Gilbert snatched the closest businessman, tie blown back over his collar at as he madly ran from one of the doors of the building by the shoulders. "What's going off!?"

"It's crashed!"

"What crashed?" Gilbert asked. "A car, a bus, a zeppelin!?"

"Let me go! I've gotta get to the bank!"

_Rude_ Gilbert thought. He was cynical of American banks. He didn't care what made it important; he had no money there. But this marble building, he did care. If there was something wrong there, he did care if it affected Ludwig. People were running, people were watching. Sirens began to wail in the distance and hundreds of papers sailed like embers in the air. He knew he should go home, there was nothing he could do here. But he couldn't bring himself to go without Ludwig. And like any sort of crash, it was impossible to look away.

* * *

**Author's note:**

I though this chapter was choppy and crappy, but hopefully it's tolerable. I Didn't want to keep it waiting any more.

Fun fact, Winston Churchill was in NYC on the day of the Crash.


	3. Chapter 3

-Ludwig Beilschmidt-

There were strange sights on the way home, lines of angry worried men wove around the blocks from the banks. It was past midnight when Ludwig returned to Gilbert's apartment. Gilbert did not quite seem to understand what had happened, he seemed under the impression that a bomb had gone off. When Ludwig tried to explain what had befallen the Exchange that day, that had everybody sold their stocks all at once; that brokers had frenzied to sell when the prices started dropping to cash in on their shares before the rates got any lower, resulting in the city losing billions of dollars, of some families' savings and retirement funds being wiped out, Gilbert seemed somewhat relieved. Nothing _truly_ bad had happened to them, just other people. Until he told him that he did not have a job anymore, that he was fired.

After a moment of silence Gilbert cracked his knuckles. "...Who do I threaten?"

"No one. My boss is dead."

"What the devil...?"

"He jumped out of a window. It's some sort of business thing. Something bad happened. Some bubble popped. Something I don't think the world has seen quite like this before."

"Relax, it'll get better in a few months. Always does," Gilbert asserted with a stiff easiness, like he was knowledgeable on the subject.

"Something odd about this, Gil."

"How do you know? You've been here two weeks."

"Intuition." Ludwig said. _And_ that he had not seen anything like this since Germany's hyperinflation a few years ago. The sense of economic undoing was eerily familiar to both of the brothers.

"Intuition," Gilbert mumbled. _"Intuition. _I don't see what's so bad about this. It's stocks, it'll only effect rich people."

"No, it's not bad for us directly, we don't own any stocks. But the market serves as a barometer, and people will begin to panic. The result of that panic will become what affects us. Already you see every bank in the city has no money to give anyone."

"I saw the lines around the block," Gilbert admitted.

"It is... pretty bad."

"Maybe, if the world really does end, we could walk out of the city and just live in the woods. Just you and me," Gilbert said with a fantastic grin. He was looking somewhere far away.

Ludwig lifted his gaze hostily. "Are you damned retarded?"

"What? I can teach you to hunt."

"That's the stupidest idea I ever heard. You can't move out into the forest and build your house of sticks and turn your back on society."

Gilbert flipped his feet onto the bed. "People bother me anyway."

"Do you think you'll be the only one thinking of that? If society collapses, living in the wild is simple and easy and only works if there's no one else doing it. In a few weeks every single man without a job will consider that. All of the animals will be eaten, not to mention it's nearly winter. What when you run out of bullets? What when you twist your ankle? Get an infection? That's no way to live."

"I'll make do."

"Or starve."

"_Or_," Gilbert said, shoving Ludwig's head ruthlessly into the mattress. "Use the baby brother as bait."

"You're the little one!" Ludwig squirmed free and stared at his brother indignantly. Gilbert did not much seem to care.

"I know it's bad timing since you just got here, but if in a few weeks it really turns out as bad as you think, we'll just go back home," Gilbert said simply. Ludwig thought that was fair.

"So..." Ludwig started. He felt like he was prying into something he shouldn't, but he decided they would be better off with a financial adviser than without one, and better it was himself than Gilbert. "How much of your money is in the bank?"

"Nothing?"

"You have no money?"

"I don't have a bank account."

"You never made a bank account in this country?"

"How the hell am I going to tell a banker to keep my money if I don't speak his language? Of course I never made a bank account. I'm a cash man."

"So you don't have any money in the bank? Owe nothing on credit, have nothing in stocks? No debt, interest, margin, whatsoever?"

"I don't know what half of those things are, Ludwig," Gilbert answered flatly.

"Have you ever bought anything on credit? You know, pay a little bit now and the rest later? That is a problem now if you have debts."

"No. And that my friend, is why I don't own a home, a car, Frigidaire, a washing machine, or a radio."

Ludwig might have started laughing hysterically if he were capable. Gilbert had no idea how lucky he was. The severity of the situation in the city went right over his head. Gilbert was just as rich or poor as he ever was.

Without warning, Gilbert walked over to the side of his bed and curled his fingers under his mattress, he lifted and heaved it, and it balanced horizontally like a white wall on the floor. Sprawled on the iron base below was a nest of wrinkly green papers and a few copper and silvery buttons. Gilbert _actually_ kept his money under his mattress. He thought that was something only greedy old hoarding men did in literature when the author was trying to be funny. Ludwig couldn't believe anyone actually _did_ it.

"_That,_" Gilbert announced with the warm showmanship of a cheap circus ringleader, "Is twenty-five American dollars and eighty-four cents, and it constitutes my entire life savings."

"Well, you could be worse." Ludwig admitted the amount was more than he expected given how frequent Gilbert usually went drinking. Perhaps this country's prohibition was half good for something after all. Ludwig dug around in his pockets and added a few dollars to the pile. "We'll get by for a few weeks. If we're careful."

"Yeah so long as you don't eat so much, fatass. I don't know how the hell you got taller than me."

"Lay off that peanut butter and we just might survive," Ludwig snapped back.

Gilbert snickered and displayed his palms in armistice. "Now help me hide it in different places. This isn't a nice neighborhood, when a thief breaks in and finds it all under the bed, he's gonna laugh his rich ass off."

They stashed the money carefully. Inside the paper label of an old can, in a vent, in a peel of wallpaper Gilbert had pasted down. Never more than five dollars in a place. When they needed money, they'd start at the right side of the room, so they could gauge how much they had left. Ludwig decided, avoiding the banks, that was as safe as it would get.

* * *

-Gilbert Beilschmidt-

"Hey, you."

Gilbert almost snorted. Said like spoken to a dog. _Hey you._ Hey, du. Should he respond?

"Help me pull this in," cut off his next thought. She said it like he owed her something, and he was just minding his own business walking down the street. It was a woman on a stoop wrestling with a piece of furniture. A cushioned bench she had bought from some peddler who had decided to sell all of his stuff, by the looks of it. He was positive she recognized him. It was The Not-Gypsy.

He sauntered nearer. She was wearing normal clothes, it must have been a day off for Gypsies. She held one half of it and was struggling to prop the other against the railing.

"I don't think so," he said.

She wrestled with a purse somehow, and threw a something on the stoop. "Take a quarter."

"Lugging that Panzer in? Shell out a clam and I might just think about it."

With a frustrated grumble, nearly losing her grip on the furniture, she tossed a dollar coin to the ground towards him. He stopped it under his boot. "Fine! Just take it before it breaks."

He took the bench from her easily, hefting the broadside of it to rest on the slanting muscle between his neck and shoulder. The extra weight caused his spine to arch slightly forward and his chest to puff out. He glanced his profile in a puddle on the street and deemed it satisfactory. The furniture was heavy and he understood her having trouble with it; had she been any other woman he might have asked her to hold one end of it. But feeling unsure about her, and perhaps somewhat guilty, his pride forbid showing that weakness. He hefted the seat higher and cleared his throat as he stared at the door to the building. "Which is yours?"

"314," she said as she dodged after him like a duckling inside.

They marched up a stair flight. "Well ya best open the door."

She slid nimbly in front of him, unsheathed a key like a cat would a claw, and swept the door ajar. He gained an odd feeling as he entered her tenement. For whatever reason, he detected no other male presence. It must have been the tolerable smell. No men's shoes or coats hung up either. The three tiny cots rather than one larger one.

_Three dirt broke unmarried Eastern European women working in a sweatshop,_ he concluded.

"Swell place. You keep your Austrian gun collection here?"

"No, but the cadavers I sell are drying in the closet."

She told him to put the bench down beneath the window before he had finished figuring out what to do with that bit of information.

He did as instructed while looking curiously about the room. It was a bit bigger than his, with the three small cots. He was almost jealous she had an apartment marginally larger, until he concluded that it had taken three women to produce the rent for it, while he was a one man show. Definitely feminine, he affirmed as he slid the bench from his fingers and stood. There was an ancient pedal sewing machine in the corner by the window, dated probably from the 1890s. He decided his window view of the fire escape was slightly nicer than her view of a nearby brick wall. She had left a metal pie tray dotted with crumbs on the open windowsill, which two fat pigeons, one gray and one pinkish tan, pecked at.

Upon the wall, hanging oddly straight in such a worn place, was a simple black picture frame about a foot square. But instead of a photograph, between the bars of wood was a stretch of white fabric. Hand embroidered onto the fabric was a red flower, threaded with such density to look like oil paint. There were dozens of little colored flowers geometrically placed around it, all sewn in different shades and species. Any white space was threaded with curling ferns, each fox-tailed leaf a slightly lighter shade of green than the leaf below it.

"D'jou make that?" he asked, jerking a grubby finger at the artwork.

She grunted, almost haughtily, her voice rising like it was asking a question. "Yes?"

"You're rather gifted with a needle."

"Girls are taught to embroider from a very young age in my country. It's an art. In the old days, a family's wealth was measured by how many embroidered pieces of cloth they had," she said summarily.

Other than a handkerchief his mother gave him that he sneezed all over, Gilbert owned no embroidered pieces of cloth. "That was status in Hungary?"

"Yes," she confirmed.

"In _Germany,"_ he began, "peasants would take the dung from their animals and broom it into a big pile on the sidewalk for all to see. If you had a large pile, you had a lot of healthy livestock, and fertilizer for the crops, so whoever had the biggest mountain of shit before his house was rich."

She must have choked on that little punching bag that hung down the back of her throat, because she squawked a few laughs before erupting in a fit of coughs. When she recovered, she glared at him harshly through her lashes, trying to detect if he was lying. Amused, he offered the woman he kept running into no hint.

"Have you a name, miss?"

"I don't need to tell you my name."

"Won't tell your name to a man who just schlepped your furniture up the stairs?"

"My family calls me Erzsébet."

His lip curled in confusion. "...Erschibet?"

"But for people here who don't speak Magyar, which is everyone, I go by Elizabeta."

_You take pleasure in making us appear the fool for trying first,_ he thought vindictively.

"Do _German_ women give names to their whelps?" she continued.

"Quite so, this particular whelp's name is Gilbert Beilschmidt."

She started walking out. It might have been a snort. Might have been a giggle. "Weird name."

"I'm quite grateful it's pronounceable, Fräulein _Erschibet," _he added as he entered the hall.

"Erszébet is easily pronounceable by those who come not from such a savage language as yourself."

_"Hungarian,"_ he mused, languid as a cat. His long fingers kneaded the stair rail boredly before tossing his chin back to her direction. "What is that? Russian or something?"

"Closer to Finnish and Estonian than Russian, actually," she retorted.

"Which are, basically, Russian."

"They're not!" Her voice expanded into the open air, and they were outside once again. There was a saying he had heard somewhere about Hungarians; that they were the only people who could exit a revolving door after you and come out before you. They were a pushy people. He was not sure how she did it, he thought he had exited the building before her, but Elizabeta was now somehow magically standing in front of him.

"Oh, wait," she said softer. She picked up the dollar coin she had dropped on the stoop. She seemed equally surprised as he it hadn't grown any feet and walked off into someone else's pocket.

"I wasn't serious I needed money for something so easy," his lips spoke. What was he thinking. He always needed money.

"You sure?"

He maintained his position with a curt nod and modest silence. "I have to get going."

Her expression was pensive, "Have this then."

She put the dollar away and presented him a shiny quarter. He squinted at it. On the side he saw was a flying eagle. He liked eagles.

"Ok," he said, deeming the bird a good omen. He took it and left.

* * *

-Ludwig Beilschmidt-

The next day looked like a bomb had gone off. Like and archduke assassinated. Like a _war zone._  
There was a hushed sort of tone about it, laughed nervously at by the people it did not affect. But it grew steadily worse. At first, it was only the rich people who seemed impacted, who with big cardboard signs sold their automobiles on the streetside so cheap Three Life Savings Of Gilbert could afford them. But then like animals before a storm, ordinary people sensed the oddness and seemed to stop buying things. And then ordinary people had less work. Ludwig sensed a chain reaction that was still far to come to fruition.

_Gilbert_ was the same: he still would go to sleep at the same time as him, leave in the middle of the night, and slide back into bed before dawn.

Ludwig had been studying his brother quietly. Gilbert never appeared to have brought anything with him he could see or came back with anything. He scented no alcohol on his breath. There were no needle marks in his arms. He did not look disheveled. He just had enough money.

Maybe it was none of Ludwig's business. Maybe Gilbert had a girlfriend and was just loving her at her place, since Ludwig's unannounced presence was currently making Gilbert's room rather unromantic. Knowing Gilbert though, he did not think he would keep a woman -even a prostitute- so meticulously secret.

The third day was an odd day.

It must have been Carnival in America, for children were dressed up. Homemade costumes from bed sheets and burlap sacks and face paint transformed themselves into skeletons, scarecrows, witches, and ghosts. He thought it odd that they would dress as such wretched things and nothing more fitted to children. What careless mothers they must have here. There was no music or singing or dancing, there was definitely something evil about it. They traveled in laughing packs from door to door soliciting things. Their guardians, their presence rare, traveled in smaller packs on the street side, in that slow gossipy walk women did when talking, never bothering to fully approach a doorstep like their children. Some families put orange gourds with crude faces carved into them on their doorsteps, the fresher ones of which were quickly stolen in a strange ritual by homeless men, the older ones whose toothy faces had started to pucker and wrinkle like an old aunt's.

Gilbert also said, this afternoon, they were going 'out.'

"Are we going to a bar?" Ludwig asked.

"SCHH!" Gilbert buzzed swiftly. They were walking down the street and Gilbert looked quickly over his shoulders, then rounded on him urgently. "Don't call it that."

"Why not? No one can understand us anyway."

"Someone will. Call it a speakeasy or Juice Joint or a cotton club, but don't ever say you're going to what it is," he instructed. "It's All Hallows' Eve tonight, so even the strict cops will be too busy to stop by. We'll head down to the Blind Pig and—"

"Why do they call it the Blind Pig?" Ludwig asked.

"'Cause everyone turns a blind eye to it," Gilbert answered curtly.

They dodged more oddly dressed sticky children and went into the place, which was disguised as a restaurant in front, which Gilbert waltzed through like he owned it. He approached a threshold in the back. The door opened and a vertical line of golden light and music appeared, which darkened, the shadow of a busboy recognized Gilbert, and rapidly let him in. Gilbert made his way to the bar.

"Brown plaids. Pair."

The bartender tipped his hat and left two whiskies on the table. Ludwig preferred beer. But Gilbert told him that beer and wine were hard to find since they required more art to make, and with lower alcohol contents than liquor also had less profit. They were, as Gilbert tried to explain to him, a bad investment. Ludwig wondered how these places obtained so much alcohol with it being illegal to make: the wall gleamed like a glass mosaic with it.

There was an entertainment fight of some sort going on in the middle of the speakeasy, one of the ones where the fighters assumed exaggerated characters to encourage the bar-goers to pick sides. The Irish one had just smashed the Italian one against a pillar. Men were betting on them. There were women there too, he noticed. A lot of women; ragged-haired things with red lips and yellow teeth and black dresses that smoked cigarettes from long fake ivory holders. They cheered more lustily for blood than the men.

Ludwig felt out of place. In German bars there were lots of teenagers because the drinking age was lower. In New York it was twenty-one, not that anyone cared to check since it became illegal, but Ludwig was still likely the youngest person there. Everyone else was old and grizzly, mid twenties, like Gilbert.

"He your brother, Beil?" someone said in English.

Ludwig's eyes shifted to his brother at the use of the ridiculous nickname. It made him sound like he led a gang of unimaginitive twelve year olds.

"Yes he is!" Gilbert said proudly.

"My God, he's as big as a horse!"

"What the devil is a whorse?" Gilbert asked. "You mean whore?"

"Ein Pferd," Ludwig inputted quietly. Odd. Gilbert seemed to have figured out the vulgar English curses like whore, while not knowing his animals.

"Oh!" Gilbert crowed in understanding, pleasedly weaving his hands together, a grin splitting his cheeks. "A horse! Ja, is he."

"Dollar he can beat the Mick."

"Two," another voice challenged.

Gilbert looked wildly around. "_Five_ dollars Ludwig will win!"

A chorus of oohs rose about the bar.

A figure stepped forward from the darkness. Cheek length, manicured blond hair swished before his shoulder. He wore a narrow white mask covering his eyes. "I'll take that bet. Looks like a high school kid." The voice was soft and millitarian, and there was an accent that wasn't quite New York.

"Actually, I graduat-" Ludwig's thought was halted when Gilbert shut his brother up with a swift nudge with his elbow. Drunken, sweaty city goers were already wrestling over to place their bets before Ludwig had fully realized what was going on.

Gilbert pulled him close and brought his chin to the hollow of his shoulder. "You can beat this guy easy," he whispered in German.

"We have nowhere near five dollars to bet! I don't even know what sort of fighting this is!"

"It's boxing. Sorta. You can kick him."

"Who am I fighting?"

A friend of Gilbert's elbowed him and pointed at the man Ludwig was to fight. He had started to take notice in Ludwig and was staring at him aloofly, expecting something was brewing.

The reigning champion was not particularly tall, but sturdy, in the pillar-like way the Irish were. With thick wrists, shoulders and hips and feet that all fell in parallel vertical lines with each other when standing. Brown freckles dusted his face and a shock of messed russet hair crowned his head. Like dual mica disks his green eyes glittered, flecked with amber dirt. A rich emerald velveteen cape was gathered at his shoulder. Gold embroidery depicted celtic knotwork along the trim, with Irish crosses, animals, and at its center a harp, also woven in the maze of gold and green knots. It looked rather gaudy in comparison to the dirted alabaster skin, sweaty suspenders and dull kilt the man wore below. He threw the cape, which a woman in the crowd quickly grabbed. He made eye contact with Ludwig now, and Ludwig's companions suddenly took a step back –all except for Gilbert- to make it evident who the 'challenger' was.

"Aw lyook! The Huns ha come out ta spah wit us!"

Gilbert was deathly alert, looking sharp as a gyrfalcon, calculating dark eyes hooded in the shadow of his skull. He realized, Gilbert's show of looking intimidating, was by association marking Ludwig worthy of fear too. Strangers were starting to look at him curiously.

A third man made himself known. He didn't have a microphone, but he did have a loud voice. Identifying the referee, Ludwig crossed into the square to talk to him.

"Excuse me, what exactly are the parameters of the fight?"

"Para_wha_?" Then, in a louder voice, "The rules? No eye gouging, hair grabbing, or crying to mama. Knock yer opponent out of the tape, keep him down for ten seconds, or he surrenders." The ringman looked threateningly at the drunks, "No interfering."

The fighter leaned back at his post, crossing his arms surely.

"Weighing in at 165 pounds, the six-match champion, hard and cold as the crags of the emerald isle, the electric Celtic, the coiled viper St. Patrick himself had to wrestle out of Ireland, Cedric Kirkland!

Hoots and howls erupted from the crowd as Cedric pranced about the circle and banged on his chest. He bent a tin "no Irish need apply" hiring sign over his knee, smashed it to the ground and kicked it to the frenzied audience. The announcer saddled close to Ludwig in their distraction. "How much you weigh, kid?"

"85?" Ludwig answered uncertainly. The announcer looked at him oddly. At least he had been that much before he left Germany. He wouldn't be surprised if after that two week long boat trip, and without proper exercise in the city, he was less.

"And at left, weighing 85 pounds, Ludwig Beilschmidt!"

Several who'd had too much to drink guffawed that the challenger reported to weigh in as a thirteen year old girl. The minority, realizing he had been using whatever post enlightenment era measurement Europeans used across the pond, bickered in pensive betting curiosity. One of the smarter ones said the word 'Kilogram.' No one arguing at the Blind Pig was really sure what a kilogram was, but they seemed aware it was not the same as a pound. Ludwig, in a stroke of embarrassment after realizing this mistake, stood up exceptionally tall to challenge anyone who thought he really did weigh 85 pounds. Whatever that was.

Cedric just cackled. "Whatdaya say folks? We'll gas em like it was 1918!" the Irishman boomed.

A stab of something between shame and anger struck his heart. His father was a veteran.

"Don't let him make ya feel outta place, Lud!" Gilbert's rile split above the din.

"And, match!"

What the hell had he gotten himself into. Sure, he was not the Kaiser's son. But he had gone to the best university in the region. One of the best universities in the best educated country on earth, in fact! Ludwig Beilschmidt, fighting like a pitted bull in a pub for the entertainment of toothless alcoholics, prostitutes, and heroine addicts yelling slurs was-

Getting hit in the face doesn't hurt. Not at first. But it left a dull high ringing in one's inner ears, a sense of disorientation like total darkness, though being fully able to see. He saw another first whirring towards him and Gilbert had trained him well enough to step with his left foot to dodge right. The fist whirled by his ear. Ludwig had grabbed the extended arm and twisted it, preparing to smash his hand down on the joint, when Cedric lurched back like a truck and headbutted him in the stomach.

Cedric was grinning now, his prancing Irish dancing feet kneading the wood in place like a racehorse, hands held like a boxer, waiting for Ludwig to take a shot.

After throwing several punches, Ludwig deemed it strange how this Irishman fought. Cedric did not bother to dodge or block any punches at all. He just took them. There was something admirable in it, but it was not a game Ludwig was content to play. He remembered something Gilbert had told him; people only punched in the chest in the talkies. If you wanted to do damage, it was best to aim creatively.

Cedric ducked low to land another hit. At the same time Ludwig's left fingers swept into the russet brown hair, yanked the chin upward, and delivered one solid punch to the thyroid. Cedric's knees buckled, and when Ludwig's fingers uncurled from his hair, the body crumpled to the floor, graceful as a sack of potatoes.

He prodded him with his shoe, wondering him dead. In the silence, he heard his own heart beat. On his first real, premeditated strike, the man had been defeated. At the emotional stillness on young Ludwig's face, the drunken crowd erupted into gasps.

The referee stooped to make sure Cedric was alive while counting bills and surmised he was. He whistled and shook his head. "I tell ya kid, you got a killer instinct," he said, flitting his hand into Cedric's clothes and coolly pulling out something green and papered. Ludwig thought he should not have been doing that.

"Stop that."

The referee's hand froze mid robbery, and hunched low like a stray, he looked at Ludwig fearfully and he removed his fingers before scurrying off into the crowd to find someone else to talk to. It seemed the night's fun was over. Ordinarily, the people might have booed at such a short bloodless fight. But for whatever reason, when Ludwig left the painted on square, they held their tongues. In fact, Gilbert seemed to be the only one unaffected. Gilbert went pushing forward to his brother, grinning triumphantly, with a fan of green gray papers in his fist.

"I knew you could do it! Seven whole dollars I got us! Ludwig, tonight we are kings!"

Ludwig was not deceived. He understood Gilbert -for reasons benevolent or greedy- had led him into this. But he trusted Gilbert's sense of judgement when it came to fighting, so he did not feel mad about being used. It ended in no way but positive -no injuries, enough money for almost a week- so with a straight unamused face he reserved judgement on Gilbert.

Gilbert was laughing, but in a nervous way that tried to veil he was slightly concerned. "What the hell did you do to that guy? You could have killed him."

"I hadn't meant to hit him so hard."

"Eh, I wouldn't want a soft egg for a brother anyway," Gilbert dismissed when he found Ludwig sufficiently sorry. He appreciated Gilbert's willingness to forget it.

"Best we go before we drink it away. Unless you want another beer?" Gilbert said.

"I'm well," Ludwig said. The bar seemed disgruntled and people were starting to look at the rich brothers like vultures. "Let's go."

They started walking back to Gilbert's tenement in the dark of the night when Ludwig had the distinct feeling they were not alone. He looked slightly behind him, then quickly snapped rigidly forward like his neck was in a steel brace before anyone was likely to notice. When he spoke his tone was low and guarded. "Gilbert, we have some followers."

Gilbert coughed into his elbow to mask turning his head, then returned forward, and kept his pace like he had seen nothing. There were three people, not talking at all, walking just far enough behind them to avoid suspicion. They had hats that covered their faces and long coats. "We'll walk in a circle around this building. If they follow us, we'll know they're after us," Gilbert commanded judiciously.

They walked in a circle around a an apartment complex. He knew it wasn't wise to make such a show of having so much money in the bar. He bet this was a profession, stake out gambling places and follow victors home with bats and knives. Their three silent shadows did not waver at all in the time it had taken the pair to return to the same spot. An anxious stiffness manifested in Ludwig's step. "_Gilbert..."_

_"I know."  
_  
"Should we fight them?" Ludwig asked.

Gilbert said it with a cool, cocky playfulness. "You wanna show em how fast we can run?"

They walked, appearing unawares, for a few seconds more. He heard Gilbert break the monotony by inhaling deeper and sharper than usual, and Ludwig took this as their cue to run. And like an exploding gun they started sprinting. Ludwig was trying to secretly race Gilbert, he knew he should not be so frivolous at such a crucial moment, but found no matter what he could not bring himself to break tie. He wondered if Gilbert was trying to race him too. Gilbert was open smiling like a running dog, not looking at him, almost laughing as he ran.

Ludwig managed to flash a look back. Their pursuers had started, disorganized, running after them. But after a few seconds of embarrassment in that they were not gaining, they fell haltingly, jerkingly, before fifteen strides, to a stop.

The two men ran and wove through buildings, half towards their home, somewhat taking false routes, until they too could do it no more and slowed to a walk. Gilbert was panting, half laughing. "See? They don't... expect you to start sprinting... but it's the most logical... thing to do."

_Only if they don't have a gun, _Ludwig thought.

At home, they both sat on the bed as they always did when they were tired: there were not many nicer places to sit. It was dark; yellow street light filtered through Gilbert's half closed translucent white curtains like light through eyelashes at the hazy break of awakeness. Ludwig sighed and leaned back and interlocked his hands behind his head. Gilbert looked at him seriously.

"We need to get you a weapon. I wouldn't want to mess with you had I my pick of preythings, but it's not safe regardless. Thieves, criminals-_ everywhere."_

"What sort of weapon?" Ludwig asked.

"Knife. Preferably a pistol, I'll see if I can scrounge something up."

"Right..."

With frightening swiftness, in the matte black cast iron and gleaming silver steel of Gilbert's usual style, he displayed a clawed knife. "Ain't she a beauty? They're not legal, it's a three sided trench blade. Outlawed them in the war."

"Where did you get that?!"

"Oh, found it in the attic when I was a teenager. Guessing Dad ripped it off some dead guy."

Stamped in the steel handle were the characters _1918 U.S._

Ludwig knew those knives. A normal knife carved a slit, which closed up. The thick three sides on this sort of blade prevented a stab or slash wound from healing and scabbing naturally, resulting in infection and death after the victim was already hospitalized. In combat, all it served to do was tear flesh in a third dimension and make the unfortunate mangled meatsack bleed to death. It was little more valuable than a flat knife in the short term but usually resulted in fatalities minutes after the attack.

"Maybe I'll just have a normal one," Ludwig said, hoping Gilbert would forget the whole thing. He didn't want _any_ weapon. He was certain he could beat almost anyone hand to hand. In his mind, carrying a knife was only a license to get stabbed.

"Suit yourself," Gilbert said, stowing it. "Just be careful. I wouldn't want someone looking to get at me look for the little brother."

_Don't worry,_ Ludwig thought. _You're not important enough. _

Immediately after that thought, there rang a third wordless echo in his head that reminded him he did not know that much about Gilbert.

They fell quickly asleep. But in the night, Ludwig heard movement and awoke. He saw a Gilbert shaped silhouette softly illuminated from the yellowy street light from the window, his pale fingered hand grazing ghostly at the wallpaper. He knew he wasn't just going to use the bathroom in the hall, he had his shoes and jacket on. Then his hand fiddled with the empty coffee can. So he _was_ taking money!

Ludwig stood suddenly and calmly up from the mattress. "What do you need ten dollars for, Gilbert."

Gilbert's head swiveled to his direction. The elder regarded him with an icy lack of alarm at his discovery that Ludwig found deeply vexing. "Mind your business."

"It is my business when we have no money, we almost got mugged because of a fight you got me into, and you go disappearing into the night with a third of what we own," Ludwig warned_._

"Watch your words. This is my money."

"And how _do_ you accumulate it on your journeys every night? What is it? _Heroin dealing?"_ Ludwig prompted. _"Pimping?"_

He was shocked at what Gilbert did then. It made him feel like a boy again, to be so smacked. Ludwig blinked the blackness from his vision and came to on the bed with Gilbert, tall and regal, standing before him.

"Insolent child!" Gilbert roared. "You show up here, expect me to feed you, and you accuse me of such?"

Ludwig shrank back like an owl who had pressed its feathers flat against its body, and wilted to half its size. Gilbert never spoke like that to him. "I'm sorry Gilbert. I had just thought..."

"You are coming with me tomorrow," Gilbert asserted with a terrifying calmness, slicking his hair from his forehead. He righted his jacket with a sharp tug, his fingers felt at something in his boot, and Gilbert left undeterred to wherever he was going before.

* * *

They were at the train station the next morning. Ludwig was surprised to find Gilbert had negotiated the underground Penn station with a quiet knowledge despite probably not understanding much of the writing around him. Gilbert brought a black briefcase with him, but Ludwig was fairly certain it was empty. When they stepped onto their train, Gilbert's eyes had flashed to Ludwig's feet, and Gilbert's mutter about how he should have gotten Ludwig better shoes made him nervous. He wasn't sure where they would be going that footwear should be an issue.

"Gilbert, I'm sorry, about what I said last night," Ludwig said after they had sat in the quietest section of the train they could find.

"What did you say last night?" Gilbert said like he'd forgotten, with a friendliness that was almost eerie, and despite the alarm bells that rang in his head Ludwig felt relived.

Many minutes passed of Gilbert looking out the window at the city, the farms, the damp black earth and orange leafed forest, before Gilbert asked: "Lud?"

"Yes?"

"What was Venus the goddess of?"

"Why, Venus was the Roman goddess of love, of course. Have you not learned this in school? You really should read some poetry sometime. I can recommend several classical Greek pieces you may enjoy, Homer's _The Odyssey_ was quite adventurous-"

Gilbert looked back out the window and muttered a grunt that suggested he had just witnessed some particularly gooey roadkill.

He was not sure where they were going. He could tell by their orientation to the rising eastern sun they were going north-northwest. But he didn't know enough about the United States to know exactly what place they were in or if they were even in the US. Upon stepping off the station three hours later, which was nothing more than a parallel pier of concrete and a railing, Ludwig's heart sank. He felt like he had arrived in some 1800s frontier mining town.

Near wordlessly, Gilbert had led him through the silent gray mining town to its edge, where the town roads, which had already been dirt, had become paths of brown dust patched with grass and the buildings lining them became massive trees. They hiked along the paths until Gilbert stopped abruptly in the dust, checked thoroughly over his shoulders, head low like a wary animal, and marched perpendicularly out into the raw forest. Ludwig's temperament decreased with every transition Gilbert's path made away from civilization, but he had no choice but to follow him into the wet trunks and ferns, and noticed the forest had taken on a cold, mossy, ominous quality. There were no symbols, guides, markers he could discern that Gilbert followed, but the elder's silent surefooted confidence caused Ludwig's avoidance of questions.

In a the small round treeless hollow where Gilbert halted, there stood three things. A two story barn with two rowing oars nailed above its door was the main inhabitant. There was a second insignificant building near the edge, he was unable to discern if it was an oversized outhouse or an undersized meat-smoking shed. Before the barn entrance in the grass was a long tall wooden post on which an oil lamp was hung. On top of the pole was a carved wooden something that looked like a hawk's silhouette. He guessed it was to scare away rodents. It reminded him slightly of a totem pole.

The only theme he found encompassed the barn, the outhouse, and the pole, was that the objects were all in deep stages of decomposition. The mismatched trio seemed interminably wet, the wooden planks were eaten though by termites and gray with age. Moss had covered most of the barn's roof and he wanted to curl into a ball and shed his outer layer of skin to avoid being in contact with whatever billions of fungus were sporing around. Gilbert strided up to the abandoned barn entrance like he thought it could actually be inhabited.

"Klopf klopf! Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair!" Gilbert sang, looking up at a window barred shut by shutters high on the peaked roof. Ludwig garnered then whoever this person was he must have spoken no German. No one answered Gilbert's call but an ugly crow.

Gilbert invited himself through the doors to find a young man scraping the blood vessels off the inside of a stretched deer hide. Shreds of white fatty membrane had coagulated in the sawdust of the floor and Ludwig had to fight not to wrinkle his nose. If Gilbert had any reticence it was unshown.

"Aha!" Gilbert said, throwing his arm around the person's shoulders, shaking him warmly and firmly as one would a family dog; though Ludwig would have advised against that, since that the person held a very large sharp disk. "This is my good friend Matoo. Mazhue. Matthieu. Somethin like that. Can barely understand a single word the bastard says, but we like each other anyway."

This interrupted Matthew, assuming Ludwig also did not speak English, bounced once on his heels, smiled amiably at him, extending his hand, his scraper swinging gently to his side.

"Hear that, you crazy psychotic moonshine fucker you?" Gilbert continued warmly in German. It was like cursing lovingly at a dog, the dog couldn't understand and it thought the hate words were terms of endearment. "Pleased to introduce you to my one and only brother, Ludwig Beilschmidt." Gilbert gesticulated grandly at his new protégé and enunciated: "LOOOT. VIIKH."

"Nice to meet you," Matthew said politely in English.

"The pleasure is mine," Ludwig returned humbly, shaking the hand.

The Matthew then regarded him with shocked, appreciative violet eyes. "Thank heaven you can speak real English. Dealing with this one was making me a charades expert."

"How do you communicate with each other?" Ludwig asked at Gilbert.

"We just gesture around with our hands and yell garbled English, French, and German at each other. And act stuff out and scratch pictures in the dust. Sometimes we go hunting on Sundays. Works out pretty well," Gilbert said summarily.

It seemed to work because this Matthew didn't talk much anyway. He wondered how they had met. Matthew had folded his hands behind his back and smiled pleasantly at this exchange in his barn of which he did not understand. Ludwig introduced himself more thoroughly in English and apologized for his brother's antics, to which Matthew just smiled and looked at the hay on the ground, never agreeing the brother's ways were a true problem in the first place.

"Anyway," Gilbert continued, "it's illegal to brew alcohol in this country, but in Canada, it's perfectly fine. So this guy brings it down from Ontario, or well, I don't really know what he does. I think he makes Moonshine too. But he always brings booze in, and he's a very important part of the organization."

Ludwig did not like that last word one bit. "_This_ is where you go every night?"

"Oh no! This is special occasion." Gilbert shook his head and laughed. "Can't come way out _here_ every night. I have to bring it to the bars."

Gilbert made some numbers with his fingers. Matthew stacked the briefcase with bottles and gave it to Gilbert. Then, with no words, they both simultaneously turned to look at Ludwig like he was a slab of meat. A stab of anxiety probed his chest.

"Take off your shirt and hold your arms out," Gilbert ordered.

Ludwig did as told. Experimentally, like vultures, the two men circled him.

"Four?" Gilbert asked in accented English. The way Gilbert said it, it sounded more like 'fear.'

"Sounds fair," Matthew answered. "Maybe even six."

Gilbert held up two cold glass bottles of something and pressed them to the underside of Ludwig's upper arms, and with bandages Matthew bound them smoothly against his flesh. Then Matthew took another two bottles and pressed them experimentally along either of his sides.

"What are you doing?!" Ludwig shouted in both languages, "Was machst du?"

"What," Gilbert scoffed, "You thought I'd just bring you along to learn? You're gonna work. That's fifteen dollars of hooch under your arms alone. You don't get caught, and we'll have the month's rent."

Matthew ignored the German babble as usual, continued binding the other bottles to his sides and, deciding he looked too flat, perfectly fit two more moon-cresented bottles along the hemispheres of his back. Ludwig shivered.

"Am I... Am I going back into the city like this?" Ludwig asked in disbelief.

"Sure, why not." Gilbert took the briefcase full of alcohol and sank an additional curved bottle into each of his own big black boots. Ludwig knew now, why men wore such large boots in the city. Gilbert threw him back his shirt, which Ludwig hesitated to button on. Putting it on would mean he condoned what he was doing. But he knew this was his punishment for last night, and seeing no preferable way out of the situation, he clothed himself. Then like vultures again, they inspected him.

"Decent suit, Ivy League haircut. Big enough that the bottles aren't noticeable. If I was a cop, I sure wouldn't stop him," Matthew said.

Gilbert nodded stoically, studying eyes not leaving Ludwig, long strong white fingers pressed to his lips, probably not understanding half of him, but agreeing with the approving tone of Matthew's message.

Shuffled out from Gilbert's black wallet were some thick gray green American dollar bills. He counted them twice and presented them to Matthew. Ludwig was doubly surprised, somewhat impressed, they did not need to speak or argue at all in their exchange. They had definitely practiced at it.

"Vielen Dank," Gilbert said with a theatric grin, bowing low to Matthew like a peacock and tipping his hat.

"He says, many thanks," Ludwig translated.

Gilbert glared at his brother, in a childish _I-know-how-to-say-that_ way.

Matthew nodded, his eyes half closed and a cocky smile stretched half across one canine tooth, understanding that much.

Ludwig felt cold and heavy and fragile. Like he was wearing glass armor. He feared he would move a certain way and the bandage covered glass would clang. Even Gilbert did not have bottles under his clothes, just in the case and his boots. He felt it wasn't right, that Gilbert was the senior in this operation, and he was making Ludwig take such a large risk.

"Gilbert... I feel like a criminal. I know we like to drink sometimes, but the American people chose to outlaw alcohol in their constitution. While we are guests of this country, even if we sometimes disobey their rules, we should at least avoid profiting by breaking it."

Gilbert seemed to have expected this enough to have an answer prepared. "So noble, Ludwig. People buy booze because they want to drink it. Alcohol has been around as long as humans have, there's nothing wrong, we're just delivering people what they want."

"You're twisting it," Ludwig said lowly. Gilbert did not hear him. Matthew sent Ludwig an unsure, sympathetic, pitying look, likely guessing from his face what his complaint was. But Matthew did not feel so strongly as to step into Gilbert's jurisdiction and say something. Ludwig knew it was unfair to think so of a man he had just met, but in Matthew's understanding of his discomfort but inability to do anything to help, Ludwig felt betrayed.

Gilbert had reprimanded him so fiercely for predicting what he was up to. But it turned out he was not so far from his first hypothesis. At least the heroin dealing one, one need merely substitute one contraband for another. He supposed alcohol was slightly preferable to opiods. Though, in an ironic way, at least opium did not have its own banning amendment in the US constitution.

"You ready? Say bye to Matthew."

"Bye," Ludwig grumbled.

"Your brother's English..." Matthew started. "It's really not so bad. He just doesn't know where to put the words in his sentences. He puts the verbs at the end sometimes. And he doesn't know a lot of words, so he sometimes makes replacements up... he called gloves 'hand shoes' once..." Matthew trailed away. "But, I bet if he wasn't afraid to speak it, he would be fluent," he added quickly, as if it remedied the situation.

Ludwig did not really want to leave. But he did not want to stay. He just wanted to be home as quickly and inconspicuously as possible and be over with this. So he started following Gilbert out, until,

"Holy strawsack! What is that?"

He nearly tripped into it. He quickly tapped himself to make sure nothing had broken. Ludwig found himself staring down yellow fangs and a black throat. A giant, taxidermied polar bear. It was tall as a rearing horse, vicious claws like meat hooks batting the air, and frozen mid roar.

"Oh," Gilbert said, flicking his free wrist nonchalantly at the posing stuffed bear in the corner of the barn. "He calls that Kumajirou."

The bootleg alcohol. The dead animal parts. General uncleanliness. He stared past the ice bear to focus on the quietly smiling springy little deer man with the vicious fleshing knife. Ludwig decided that Americans -Canadians- whatever they were, were_ crazy_.

* * *

A/N: *$1 USD 1929 ~ $14 USD 2015


	4. Chapter 4

-Ludwig Beilschmidt-

Ludwig had washed himself as soon as he got home. The amount of dirt on his skin was minimal. He just felt filthy with what he had done. The water made him feel somewhat less sinful, though he was logical enough to know it accomplished nothing. Transfixed, as he scrubbed his hands, Ludwig in his low voice began calmly, almost musically, to recite to himself,

_"Out, damn'd spot! out, I say—One; two: why, then_  
_'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and_  
_afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our_  
_pow'r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to_  
_have had so much blood in him?"_

Gilbert looked up at Ludwig chanting in English at the sink as he washed feverishly at his hands. "What are you mumbling about?"

"Nothing," Ludwig said, shutting the water off. "I just thought it was ironic."

Gilbert grunted, and standing said, "I'm gonna go out and start getting rid of this stuff."

Ludwig wished Gilbert did not announce these things. He had just wanted to know last night approximately what he was up to. Knowing the details of the where and the when now made him feel more responsible to stop his brother, and though he fervently wished Gilbert would carve a living some other way, he couldn't at this point exactly afford to have him unemployed. Ludwig now simply wanted to ignore it as much as possible.

Cheerfully humming _Ode To Joy_ to himself, Gilbert took what alcohol he could and left.

* * *

-Elizabeta Hedérváry.

"I'm so sorry Natalya. A flush beats a straight. I'm so sorry."

"Nooo..." Natalya moaned, fanning her cards down on the table, as Lili quietly took the last three of Natalya's peppermints for herself.

The women played for whatever junk they had. Stale candy, pennies, pretty quartz pebbles they found at parks. Elizabeta always thought the spread of worthless junk on their table instead of money looked charming, and she liked that part about the game best.

"I think that's enough cards for tonight," Elizabeta said. Both Lili and Natalya looked relieved. It was never smart to get in the habit of staying up so late when they had to get up so early.

"I hate the textiles," Natalya mumbled, seating herself on her hardsprung bed which squealed a squeaky protest. "At least you get to sneak off on your free days and play Gypsy, Elizabeta. Maybe I should try that."

"Trust me, it's not that liberating. Creeps are everywhere."

Natalya grinned knowingly. "You just don't want competition. Capitalist."

"You say that like a bad thing," Elizabeta purred, flicking off the light and settling into her own cot.

How much later she could not say, but their night was interrupted by a noise at the door. It was a simple, two part knock. Scary and deep by a man's broad knuckles.

Elizabeta and Natalya looked at each other urgently from their beds. No one ever knocked on their door, never past midnight, and it was never a good sign. The women turned no lights on. Guided by moonbeams from the window Lili swayed behind the bed. Like silent panthers, Natalya and Elizabeta advanced on the door. Elizabeta poised to open it, Natalya stood out of sight with a kitchen knife. Slowly, Elizabeta's fingers fastened on the knob and dragged it open. Natalya had near lunged when a person swayed and fell in on Elizabeta, but instead the Belarusian woman had pushed herself next to Elizabeta and struggled with her shoulders to lift the body away, until it caught its wind and locked its knees again.

Red eyes caught at Elizabeta desperately. He was clutching at his right arm, and spoke quickly in German. "I was walking. Someone robbed a store, broken glass everywhere. Please, can you help?"

Natalya looked at her urgently. There was a message in her dark barred eyes. _You know him?_

"Why aren't you at the hospital?" Elizabeta asked him.

She needn't have asked. He could afford hospital bills about as much as she or a park squirrel could.

She brought Gilbert quickly to her table and sat him on the chair she cared least about getting gore on.

"Who is this?" Natalya asked in English.

"Don't know. Gilbert SomethingwithaB."

"That's a knife cut," Natalya alerted. If Gilbert understood her he showed no sign. "Glass is thicker."

"Quick, bring me a needle, tweezers, scissors and black thread."

Natalya brought what was asked of her and turned their lamp on, and Elizabeta laid Gilbert's forearm before it. Lili fetched rags, swabbed Gilbert's arm, and lay them beneath.

Her eye caught the embroidery looming darkly on the wall he had so complimented, and understood then why he had come here, to a near stranger, for help. This Gilbert did not know her well, but he thought she knew her way around a needle.

She pulled the black thread through the hard fishlike needle eye, doubled it, and tied a knot at the end. She was wise in this case, rather than in ordinary seamstressing, to err the thread on the side of being too short than too long. Flesh was not a piece of fabric. She would have to tug whatever hard coarse cotton she cut through his muscle. Better she started a new thread than drag his nerves and veins from his skin.

They had no alcohol to dull the pain or to clean with, so used water instead. Gilbert had turned his head away. She whispered a warning, gritted her teeth, and carefully pricked the needle at a 45 degree angle through his skin at the edge of the wound and pushed until she saw it emerge shimmering inside the cut, and kept pushing it through the other side until the metal surfaced shining in blood from the white. His dark pupils flickered back from the corner of his eye to observe the completion of the first stitch. The black thread was strong against his white, near translucent flesh and she saw its path glow underneath his skin. She pulled the string taut, and he, looking faint, turned his head again and stared into the room's darkness. She ordered for Lili to get him a glass of water.

She had repeated the process four more times. Gilbert had stopped looking over and continued to turn his head fixatedly into the darkness.

"Is he drinking that ok, Lili?" Elizabeta asked. She delicately snipped the wet string with a scissor.

"He's dead."

Elizabeta and Natalya, like calm quick birds, old enough to know the cut had probably not killed him, retreated from their positions and aimedly prodded select parts of the subject: his wrist, his throat. Natalya waved her hand before his face, and his rabbit like red black eyes did not follow her hand.

"No, Lili, just unconscious," Elizabeta said.

"I don't like his eyes."

Elizabeta brushed his eyes closed.

"We are very lucky it's on an extremity," Natalya noted. "He could be on Grim's sickle had he let the strike land in a vital region."

"You think he was stabbed in a fight?" Elizabeta asked.

"Yes. Broken glass can't rip you like that. You'd need a thick piece, but it would break off."

"I hope we haven't just harbored a wanted criminal," Elizabeta said.

And they stared at the strange person now slumped on their table, not really sure what to do with him.

"He shouldn't have to sleep like that," Lili's quiet voice broke.

"Don't give em one of our good blankets, he'll leak all over it," Natalya muttered.

Elizabeta and Lili looked at each other, then at the unconscious German slumped on the table, and with their two ascending votes draped him in a blanket. Lili started sliding off his boots, one lay on the floor, and when the left came off she squeaked, and like a crab braced herself on the ground by her palms and feet. Clattered out to the wood from the boot, spinning like a bottle, was a huge knife.

"Good God, look at that monster!" Elizabeta gasped. It was long and not particularly sharp, but the blade was uncannily gruesomely thick to the point that it was three dimensional. The planes came together in something her math teacher might have called an isosceles triangle. There were loops for the fingers, like brass knuckles, each coming to a point like clawed toes on a wolf's pawprint. It was the same one he had tried to mug her with.

"That's a trench knife," Natalya said.

"Trench knife?" Elizabeta echoed. It wasn't a knife, more like a railroad spike.

"In the war, soldiers would attack with them when they jumped in somebody's trench. One stab, if you don't bleed to death gangrene'll getcha. Nasty to get punched with the claws, too." Natalya rubbed her chin. "Pretty sure they're illegal."

Elizabeta squinted judiciously, strode forward and claimed the knife. She hid it in a drawer with their silverware. In case this was an elaborate scheme to rob them or worse, the man would now be doing so without the aid of a weapon. She was confident without it that if she and Natalya had to gang up on him, they would win in a fight. She asked Lili for the pistol. It was technically Lili's pistol, one her overprotective brother gave her as some weird sort of Swiss family heirloom tradition. She placed it under her own pillow just in case this Gilbert tried to pull something again.

Elizabeta was not cruel, but she was not trusting. She would not kill him, but if he tried anything funny again, she would not hesitate to shoot him in the leg.

"You don't think he did this to himself, do you?" Elizabeta asked.

"No. The strike is from a different knife. If he cut himself with this, the best surgeon in New York couldn't save his arm."

"Is it safe for us to leave him to sleep?" Lili peeped. "Should we watch him? Tell the neighbors, a doctor, the police?"

"What's he gonna do? Rape all three of us at once?" Natalya snorted in an apparent change of concern. "He hasn't even got enough blood left in him to raise a flag. I'm going back to bed: scream if you need me."

Upon Elizabeta's waking at dawn that morning, their visitor was gone. She hadn't expected him to leave so silently, so early, or to wake up on his own when his body needed rest. In fact, he probably didn't even know what to do with the stitches or if and how he should take them out. He probably should have stayed inside at least until he could see straight. If he was dumb enough to journey home when he knew he wasn't ready to, then Lady Darwin would rid the world of one more idiotic man.

The first thing she did was check for the knife, which remained either never looked for, or never found. It glimmered hidden under a few metal forks in the drawer. The glass of water Lil had poured for him was now empty. He had left little evidence of his stay, sans the fact that it seemed he had liquidated his person of pocket change, probably the only money he had on him. Natalya thought the constellation of pennies and dimes on their kitchen table hilarious, started laughing, 'what's he paying you for, your medieval stitching knocked him out cold,' holding up the payment from the patient who was stupid enough to pay the not-doctors, and claimed with it the skilled healers should all buy doughnuts for breakfast. Elizabeta quietly disagreed. It was admirable he had tried to pay, likely more as apology for his intrusion than for his medical treatment, but agreed the money was best spent on doughnuts. She was sick of eating old bread.

Elizabeta helped to gather up the scattered coins. She examined one in her hand. "American coins are pretty. I like that they have Lady Liberty on the quarters."

Natalya looked at Elizabeta like she was crazy. "Did you hear? They're going to put George Washington on it next year."

"Oh swell, another man, don't have enough of those."

"_Oh_," Natalya sighed longingly, "You'd be such a good communist if you'd just put your mind to it."

"Except that I like money, Nata."

"We're already rock bottom broke, at least if here was communist we'd get paid like we was men," Natalya piped cheerfully. She was stroking the wood grain of the table. "Aww, look, Krauty even wiped up his gore."

Lili was checking the cupboards. "He didn't take anything..."

"I think there's a little blood on it," Natalya said, scratching at a little brown on the knife blade.

"Maybe it's rust," Lili supplied hopefully, leaning over. Natalya placed the knife on the table and spun it lazily. Its weight was uneven and it trembled as it rotated, before ghosting to a halt, and slowly pointed at Elizabeta.

"What are we gonna do with the knife?" Elizabeta raised.

"Sell it," Natalya said.

"That would be theft," Lili reasoned quietly. "I think we should return it."

"How," Natalya said. "We know nothing about this person."

Lili as usual, was quieted by Natalya rather than state her opinion twice. It was Elizabeta who was the middle of the road, and therefore unofficially the mediator of group decisions. Or she was the responsible one who collected everyone's money together for rent, at least.

"The only person who would buy it is another gangster. Pawning it back into the city would do no good. We'll destroy it," Elizabeta ruled.

"I'm not saying a criminal would take it, maybe a war museum curator would," Natalya said lamely.

Elizabeta gathered her coat. Lili had finished putting a tattered purple silk ribbon in her short blond hair and Natalya was still boredly spinning the knife. "Come on," Elizabeta said, opening the door. "I know of a great bakery on the way to the factory and the high school. "

* * *

-Ludwig Beilschmidt-

When Ludwig came home for the day, the apartment was spotless. He moved to place his books on the table, but he was startled to find a person sitting there. "_You're_ here?"

"Sick of me existing in my own apartment?" Gilbert smirked.

"No, usually now you're, I just thought you'd be_..._" Ludwig trailed away. Out doing illegal gangster things.

"I'm home today," Gilbert said simply.

Ludwig quickly wondered if today was a holiday of some sort. He decided it wasn't, for if it was, the public would especially be in want of alcohol and Gilbert definitely would not be resting. "You are ill?"

"Yeah-"

A pang of worry struck Ludwig. "How many cigarettes have you been smoking? Does the water here taste funny to you? It tastes funny to me. What if it's like what happened to the Indians? You could be totally unprepared to combat American pathogens! It could have been germinating in you for who knows how long!"

"No, I," Gilbert looked at Ludwig bizarrely, not wanting to deal with such concern. "Forget it. I just cut myself accidentally. Give me a day."

"You hurt yourself?" Ludwig said suspiciously. Gilbert was surprisingly graceful, he seldom hurt himself.

"Some nut job nicked me with a knife when I was walking last night. It's really not that bad._"_

"You were _stabbed_? Let me see," Ludwig demanded, stepping nearer. Ludwig wondered, a chill seeping into his veins, that if Gilbert got hurt, and Gilbert had that evil knife, if whoever had hurt him was dead.

"Hey, space." Gilbert pushed him away.

"Do you need me to bandage it?"

"No, got that taken care of."

"You got stitches?

"It's not bad. I think in a few days it won't be a problem. " Gilbert's eyes worked quickly. He sighed once and pressed his lips together. "Let me show you something."

Gilbert drew what looked like a giant drippy carrot onto a piece of newspaper on the table. A long fat lumpy warty tumored finger with the point facing down. He guessed that was meant to be Manhattan island again. He drew a rectangular bone down the middle of it, maybe that was meant to be Central Park. Gilbert needed to work on his cartography skills.

"There are two main gangs in this city right now," Gilbert explained. "They make their money by selling alcohol: like any sane soul in this time and place should. For education purposes, I'm going to call them the Angry Slavs and the Angry Italians. They're both bahtshit crazy and I want you to stay away from both of them."

Gilbert drew some loops on the map.

"Crazy Italian Fascist Territory," he announced. He drew a loop encompassing the bottom and west sides of the peninsula. "And Crazy Slav Commie Land." He drew a loop along the rightward edge of the triangle and arching a bit over the north. It was like an oriental yin yang sign.

"_We_, are right here. The dwindling carcass of little Germany." Gilbert drew an_ X_ at a spot, somewhere towards the bottom lumpy tip of the triangle and a bit to the right, where the two loops overlapped. Ludwig noticed it looked somewhat like a map of Europe. The Russians were on the east and the north. The Italians to the south and west. And them, Germans, in the middle.

Ludwig grimaced at their spot right in the crossfire between the two warring factions. "Time to find a new apartment?"

"No no, this has worked out perfectly. If I was doing my thing in any one of these territories, I would be a money losing nuisance quite easy to find. But since it's no-mans land, or no one ever has permanent control over it, I can bootleg stuff around just fine. Bad side is, it makes the neighborhood a bit er, violent."

_"I see."_

"Which is why I always want you to be extra careful," Gilbert educated.

Ludwig frowned, irked at the warning from Gilbert. When _Ludwig_ got stabbed while bootlegging, _then_ his brother could tell him to be careful. Gilbert's lips tightened to smile in a change of subject, sensing his brother's distaste. "What have you brought there?"

"Oh yes! Many many books. Shakespeare, Hemingway, James Joyce. Most of them are in English, but I found a few German ones. This one is in French! I must work on my French. I have to stay in top form, I'm _certainly_ not going to allow myself to get dumber just because I'm in America," Ludwig said.

Gilbert's eyes traced towards the pile of bound books that were on the table. On the top was Shakespeare's _Macbeth_. "So you go out to the library every day... and when you come home, you bring the library back..."

"And here's my list, I write down every foreign word I don't know in the books, and then I look up the translation." Ludwig proudly showed him a long paper list that must have had at least four columns, each with somewhat sizeable words. They all dutifully had the German version written next to them in Ludwig's neat script.

"Wow. Good for you kid," Gilbert said.

"You should try reading too. You could learn English and you wouldn't have to talk to anybody."

"I don't think I can read Shakespeare yet, Lud."

Ludwig chuckled. "No, I think you can be native in English and still not understand that one."

"By the way, I've been wanting you to read something for me," Gilbert said. It felt foreign to Ludwig that Gilbert actually needed him for something.

"Oh?" Ludwig leaned closer.

"I saw a friend getting pissed about it. I took it out of his trash." Gilbert rearranged the articles on the disheveled English newspaper he had drawn all over before selecting a page, squinting at the title, and presented it to Ludwig. Ludwig snapped it taught before his nose and read the headline.

"US to repatriate German loans."

"What's that mean?"

"It means Germany has to give America back the money they loaned to us to rebuild the country and pay war reparations."

Ludwig kept reading, his voice going up as if it were a question he didn't believe. "Reichsbank to send 14 million to the United States in gold and currency...?"

"THIS IS THE DAMN STUPIDEST IDEA I'VE EVER HEARD," Gilbert exploded. "They pulled the rug out from under us, it's gonna spread to the rest of Europe! And without the rest of Europe, who is gonna buy all of America's extra shit and make them money!"

"Very astute, Gilbert." Ludwig said calmly, folding the paper. Even now if they had the money to go back to Germany, that probably was no good idea. "This might be a problem."

"Just when things were starting to even out in Germany. Damn, are our parents gonna be alright?"

"You're asking the wrong question," Ludwig said, standing, his arms spreading. "Look at two unskilled foreigners who have no jobs."

"Shit," Gilbert cursed. "And with Stresemann gone and kicked the bucket, who knows what's gonna happen."

"Gustav Stresemann? Germany's foreign minister is dead?"

"Yeah, dead at 51. Stroke or something, a few weeks back. You must have been on the boat when it happened. It was kind of a big deal," Gilbert said.

"And old Hindenburg is half senile. Better hope someone decent takes control of this country's affairs," Ludwig mumbled.

"So many crazies out there nowadays," Gilbert muttered. "It'll be a miracle if a fascist doesn't crop up on the throne."

* * *

-Elizabeta Hedérváry-

It wasn't midnight, just past six p.m., so when there was a knock on their door, Lili simply said, "I'll get it."

The man stood tall, back straight, feet slightly apart, his head nearly touching the ceiling in a militarian stance that made the room feel too small for him. Lili was dwarfed before him, the crown of her head reaching his collar, she looking like a pastel and frilly chick in her dress and the man in his black double breasted peacoat as a dark and angular raven.

"Good evening," Gilbert said lowly, rollingly, dipping his head in a humble bow, blinking his eyes, and folding his hands before his belt in greeting. With the motion in one of his hands swung a black briefcase.

Elizabeta was quick at the point. "Why are you back here?"

"I thought I'd say thanks. I brought some wine," he said summarily.

Elizabeta backed up a step, gestured with her chin inside, towards the table where he could deposit his gift.

Confident as a cat Natalya strolled over. "Howya healing up, gangster? Gangrene set in yet?"

"No, I wrapped it and washed it three times a day. With the good vodka, too." He pushed up the sleeve of his suit jacket to display a neatly wrapped row of white bandage.

"Vodka? You have vodka?" Natalya asked with too much interest.

He sleeved his arm and looked at her. "Why? You want some?"

"This house is no business place!" Elizabeta snapped.

"Awuh really?" Gilbert pouted. He gestured at Lili. "I brought some heroin for the kid too."

Lili blushed and Natalya started laughing. Laugh at his jokes, great way to make him feel welcome. Traitors. She was unsure how much he could be trusted. He seemed to prove his personality was not evil, but his morality was twisted since the night he tried to rob her. It was not something her pride would forgive. She was willing to let dead things lie after their last incident -he did help her lug that thing up two flights of stairs- but like a bad case of the flu he just kept showing up.

"I am Natalya. How are you called?" Natalya asked, rising on her toes playfully and swaying to the side to examine their guest.

"Gilbert Beilschmidt."

"What say you Liz? Allow a Mr. Beilschmidt to stay for supper? You know him, don't you?"

Allow a certain Mr. Beilschmidt in her house? _Mister_ Beilschmidt? She had just about waited long enough to be polite enough to dismiss him. Stupid Prussian pig. Saupreußen. After she sewed him up now she had to feed him too? And all he had to offer was a lousy bottle of wine she didn't want anyway. They absolutely didn't have the money to throw food to strangers. And sly cat, Natalya knew well Wednesdays were her night to cook.

"That is not necessary," Gilbert said quickly.

"I don't know how much we have," Elizabeta added.

"Oh nonsense, we've plenty." With that Natalya drew Gilbert further inside their tenement and seated him on the bench by the window he had brought in last week.

As he was herded away the German looked fleetingly at her, trapped, his brows raised, his eyes wide and honest, expression subdued to avoid detection by Natalya or Lili. She wasn't sure what he was trying to communicate, but it did reveal something of 'sorry.'

And now because of him they were speaking German in her house. It was Lili's first language, Elizabeta's second, and certainly way down past three on Natalya's list. German was the only other language than English they all three knew to some degree, but why would they practice German in New York City? It would benefit them all if their English was better, and that had been their agreement. Natalya's German had only been good enough to read _Das Kapital_ anyway; why the Belorussian wanted to speak with him was beyond her. This Gilbert was not even especially good looking, and had the mien of an underfed white buzzard.

She was, however, pleased that Gilbert looked terribly awkward. He probably had a prostitute to be dining with.

Luckily she had gone shopping earlier. Refusing to look poor, Elizabeta planned to cook and present every scrap of food they had in their house than the modest dinners they usually ate. He probably ate a lot anyway, he was wiry in that way of a man who had smoked since he was sixteen, but she bet it disappeared somewhere. Like a stray mutt led by its nose, Gilbert wandered over to her stirring at the stove. "Is there any way I can help?"

"No," she said flatly.

"What are we having?"

"Gulyás. Beef paprika goulash."

"We don't have that where I'm from."

_Of course not, _she thought. _Where you're from the sun doesn't shine and everybody sucks down spiceless potatoes and swine intestines._

"I'm not a very good chef. I can survive on it, but it's been a while since I dined with someone who was."

"Mn," she hummed, stirring, trying to get him to go away. Poor fool thought Elizabeta was above average.

"Shall I set the table?"

"You don't know where anything is," she replied coldly.

"I shall set the table," he reaffirmed to himself in a typically male way, as if he had not heard her, messily opening their few cabinets and drawers. Lili, ever observant, quiet as a moth had flitted to the man's side and guided him gently.

Their kitchen table was somewhat oblong. Not quite a square, just an ugly imperfect leftover wooden rectangle a few inches longer on one side than the other. Lili liked to face the window to watch the birds and Natalya liked to sit on the other because it was warmest by the radiator, so Elizabeta always seated herself on the short side. It wasn't planned that way, but the short side made Elizabeta the unofficial head of the table. This left the only other short head open opposite her, and as Gilbert took it, with Natalya and Lili bickering and lining the sides, she suddenly unpleasantly felt like a parent.

"You bring us the good Italian stuff?" Natalya asked facetiously, knowing the answer as well as anyone it was probably fermented in a bathtub.

"As close as it gets. It's from New Jersey," Gilbert joked. He uncorked the bottle and started around the table.

"You needn't pour that, Gilbert, you're our guest," Natalya cooed.

"Nonsense."

He poured her, then Natalya, then himself, a small glass of wine. It smelled sweet and black and tiny pink bubbles frothed on the top. Elizabeta was secretly anticipating, she had drank no alcohol since she arrived in the United States. Gilbert made eye contact with Elizabeta as he stopped with the bottle behind young Lili. "For Lili?"

"She may, if she wants," Elizabeta stated. Lili was nearly old enough to drink in Liechtenstein, and Elizabeta did not know when Lili would have another chance here. Why was he asking Elizabeta anyway, Lili was a sharp young lady capable of making her own decisions.

"I'd rather water," Lili said. Without further pressure Gilbert got her water.

"How is the typical big meal at the Beilschmidt household?" Natalya asked.

Gilbert looked at her a little oddly, as if he found it weird someone would eat anything else and his answer wasn't obvious. "Wurst and potatoes?"

Oh Isten, he was just a joke.

"We pretty much ate meat and potatoes every day at my house in Switzerland," Lili said.

Well, Lili was also something of a German it made sense culturally they are the same bland things. But the Swiss still crafted a lot of good desserts chocolates and cheeses.

"Me too. Except sometimes the meat part was questionable. And during the revolution the potato part was, also, quite optional," Natalya snickered.

"You were around in the Russian revolution?" Gilbert asked.

"Couldn't forget it. Burning houses down. Mass shootings. Swell old times."

Gilbert grimaced. "I assume, if you've left, your family has been on the side of the Whites."

"Oh no!" Natalya laughed in a dismissive, powerful veilingly polite way. "My Blood runs red. Communism through and through."

"Then why did you come here?"

"Herr Beilschmidt," Lili cut quietly. Gilbert stopped his nosiness. He might have been slightly irritated if Elizabeta had cut him off, but since Lili, the meek teenager, calmly had, it only seemed to make him curious.

When it was time to go, Gilbert seemed eager to leave, but was good at disguising it. He had asked to help clear the table, likely knowing Natalya and Lili would not allow it, and when they denied him, he did not fight them for the pleasure. He complimented the food, the appearance of their apartment, thanked them for their hospitality. He said goodbye, tipped his hat, and like a gentleman left.

"Prussians," Elizabeta huffed, sitting on the window bench with Natalya after the women had finished cleaning. "The only thing possibly more mannerless than an Austrian."

"Oh come now, don't be racist, how do you know he's from East Prussia?"

"Isn't it obvious? His accent, what he does to his own language is atrocious."

"He was nice enough."

"Only because he sensed he was intruding. He'll be back to being obnoxious next time he sees us."

"Next time?" Natalya said teasingly, and Elizabeta realized her mistake too late.

Lili was sewing a dress on the machine, and it was much too loud for her to hear them. Lili was very good at crafts and making piecemeal bits of clothing. Since she was in school and could not have a full job, Lili insisted upon it to pull her weight. Sometimes Elizabeta would embroider designs onto the dresses, flowers and birds and dancing deers and things on the trims, if she thought one was especially nice. Lili didn't make as much money as Elizabeta or Natalya, but neither of the older women minded, and had taken a maternal care to her. Elizabeta was very proud and fiercely protective of the strange girl.

"How do you know him?" Natalya whispered under the rattle of the machine.

"He, he tried to mug me one night."

"What! I wouldn't have been so nice to him! At the house?"

"On the street. I was out a little later and was counting some change."

Natalya pursed her lips and acquired a reserved expression. "Not as clever as you usually are."

Elizabeta was incensed at the lack of sympathy. "Oh and I suppose it would have been my fault too if he had raped me?"

"Easy easy, of course it's his fault. You take Lili's gun when you go street performing, how the hell is he still alive?"

"He pulled a knife, and I threatened to shoot him, but the dumb stone took that the wrong way and barreled into me anyway. Some other German showed up to distract him, I smashed him in the jaw with the pistol butt and ran away."

Natalya was shocked by her patience. "I would have shot the poor crow!"

"I don't want to go to jail, Natalya!"

"Jail in America doesn't sound so bad. I have some friends there, you should see jail in the Soviet Union."

Elizabeta sighed. "I am a believer that men are not brutes. They are just as reasonable as women and capable of making fair decisions. However, I just need to find such a man."

Natalya snorted. There was another knock on the door. Quite popular their little tenement had become. Lili had stopped sewing and everyone looked at the door.

"He leave something?" Elizabeta asked.

"Dime says he comes back to ask you on a date," Natalya said with a grin.

Elizabeta sat up from the window bench and with long strong strides opened the door.

Ivan Braginski was a busy man. Impeccably dressed. An odd one to be standing at their splintery peeling door. She thought him a rare man to ever see alone and he had graced his baby sister and her roommates with the pleasure. Elizabeta had thought it odd at first, that Natalya's brother was so affluent yet she chose to live in a tenement with two other foreign women she let circumstance throw her together with. He was big in some business somewhere. Though Elizabeta, not often dealing with Ivan and not wanting to involve herself either, never pressed Natalya for details. Though one could construe that with the laws in America where the money was.

Natalya stood and Ivan smiled in greeting, his gaze sweeping roundly to the three young women. "My, what is that delicious smell."

"Goulash," Elizabeta and Natalya said. "I'm quite sorry we ate it all," Elizabeta added.

"No no, not that."

They realized then he smelled the wine.

"You have no quarrel with us drinking wine, brother?" Natalya said reasonably. The corked bottle of red wine remained, Elizabeta realized somewhat foolishly, in plain sight on the table.

"Oh no not at all dear Natka. I am only somewhat hurt you did not ask me for it. I would have gladly given you some," Ivan said with a gentlemanly charm in his voice.

Elizabeta was suddenly afraid Ivan had picked that moment exactly to drop by. He was a very busy man.

"It was a gift," Elizabeta said quickly, a biting cold fear like poison dripping into her veins. "We didn't pay anyone for it."

"Who brought it?"

"A man."

"I know it was a man," Ivan said with sudden astuteness, impatient at the worthlessness of the information. "I watched him come. And I have seen this one before moving bottles around the city."

The women stared at him. Ivan filled the silence.

"You understand, I also have dealings in this business. We lose money from men like him."

"Was it your men? Who attacked him that night?" Elizabeta pressed.

"Possibly. Could as likely be the Dagos. Or some other lonesome wolf as himself. There are too many such orders and disappearances for me to know about the underlings," Ivan said.

No one responded. Natalya and Elizabeta stared at him in disbelief, Lili, with something akin to fear.

"I'm only saying do not get too attached to him. I do not imagine he will be around long."

He turned to leave but Natalya caught his arm. They spoke quickly in Russian, or Belorussian, or Ukrainian; Elizabeta would be lying if she said she could ever tell. Natalya was angry, threatening almost, and Ivan was unyielding. One was a small and ragged animal, the other a large and smooth stone. Then they suddenly stopped talking, stared at each other with indignant heads back, narrowed eyes, Ivan swept the door open and he left.

Worried, Elizabeta looked at Natalya expectantly. Natalya groaned. "Probably gonna find that German all chopped up in the bay, that's what."

"I'm not his friend, and he's a misogynistic jerk, but... He seems to want to apologize. I don't want anyone to get murdered," Elizabeta confessed.

Natalya nodded. "I'll see what I can do."


	5. Chapter 5

-Ludwig Beilschmidt-

"When using these prepositions you are to use the direct object or indirect object case, which in English are the same. So he would be him, she would be her, and it remains it," Ludwig instructed.

"Nmm." Gilbert was scribbling madly.

"In English the definite article 'the' remains the same whether in the accusative or dative cases."

"Uh huh."

"And of course, in the nominative subject case, but you knew that already."

"Yep."

"The same goes for variations, such as 'this,' 'that,' and 'those' and 'these."

"Ludwig?"

"Yes?"

"Why do they call it a 'building' if it's already built?"

"I don't know."

At the non sequitur, Ludwig was struck with the uncanny feeling Gilbert was not paying attention. "Show me your notes."

With no objections Gilbert handed his paper on prepositions over.

_ENGLISCHE PRÄPOSITIONEN_

_Mit = with_  
_Aus = out of_  
_Für = for_  
_Von = from_  
_Über = about, above_  
_Nach = to, after_  
_Bei = by? With?_  
_Auf = off? on?_  
_Zu = to(o)?_  
_Seit = ?_  
_Gegen = ?_  
_Neben = ? ? ? ? ? _

Somewhere along Gilbert had gotten bored, and sketched a lopsided chicken sitting on 'above' trying to eat the word 'of.'

Ludwig sighed deeply. He guessed there _was_ improvement. When he had first tried to figure out how much Gilbert knew of English, Gilbert had spelled Yes with a J. He wasn't sure if it was a joke or not.

"You need to take more disciplined notes," Ludwig said, throwing them onto the bed.

Gilbert crossed his legs and placed them on it. "My brain is too old for language class."

"You could be learning a language much harder than English, trust me. You've lived in the country for a considerable time, and you have me as liaison to teach you. People have it much worse. There is no reason for you not to speak English."

"I like being German."

"Me too," Ludwig said. "But you could be a very successful German if you spoke another language."

Ludwig trusted Gilbert would learn English excellently. Not because Gilbert cared about culture or worldliness, but because he detested helplessness. He doubted the weeks of Gilbert asking him to read newspaper headlines would be long. Gilbert desired to be a self sufficient person and he was much too proud to allow himself to be viewed by anyone as a bumbling foreigner.

"Telegram!" a voice yelled outside the door.

"Telegram?" Ludwig echoed. Those were for rich people. "Who would send us a telegram?"

"Perhaps I forgot to pay something," Gilbert muttered. "Either that or great aunt Heidi kicked the bucket. Let's hope it's the last one and she has some inheritance to give us."

"Gilbert, you devil."

"Jeez, just kidding." Then, in a smoother snicker, "You know I'd rather Aunt Gertrude croak than Heidi."

A black boy stood straightly at the door holding a piece of paper straight at his thigh. He nervously took a step back from the door when he saw how tall Ludwig was.

"Mr. Beilschmidt?" he asked. He said it like beelschmidt.

"That's us," Ludwig said.

The carrier seemed quite perplexed by the use of 'us.' He looked between the two men before glancing back at the paper. "'Says here, Gilbert?"

"Uh oh, what did I do this time?" Gilbert said to his brother with a wink, like he was joking about having been summoned to the school headmaster's office. He strode up to the boy, seized the letter, tipped the boy a dime, and closed the door. Ludwig thought it was strange how one had to tip people in America.

Gilbert unfolded the paper.

MR GILBERT BEILSCHMIDT

MEET AT THE SHEEP MEADOW  
CENTRAL PARK SAT 1500  
HAVE PROPOSITION FOR YOU

NATA B

Ludwig was leaning over his brother's shoulder. He cleared his throat. "That says-"

"No no! It has easy words! I know this one!" Gilbert silenced. His white face twisted into an ugly mask, squinting and frowning in thought, before he spoke:

"She has a preposition for me?"

"PROPosition," Ludwig said, his mouth sticking on the O that separated it from the previous grammar lesson. "Not preposition."

Gilbert's voice raised pitch in an uppity, British mock-offense. "You mean she doesn't want to talk about grammatical prepositions? What an uncultured swine! Why, what could possibly be more engaging than-"

"Very funny, Gilbert," Ludwig quieted him dryly. "Proposition: It means she wants to offer you something in business of which you can either accept or decline."

Gilbert frowned soberly, the paper stretched between his fingers as he studied it.

"Do you know a Nata B?" Ludwig asked.

"I think I might. Don't know about the last name. Now the little tart's got me curious."

"Me too."

"Huh..." Gilbert trailed.

"What's wrong?"

"Funny thing is, I never told her where I live..." Gilbert frowned and folded the paper.

"That's soon. I'll walk with you," Ludwig said. He had never been to that northern part of the city before, and was curious as to what Gilbert's presence was requested for. But he would leave before he met this person. It was probably best he stayed away from Gilbert's business, given last time he stuck his nose in it he was repurposed as a drink donkey.

As they left their apartment, Gilbert halted a few steps onto the road and glared at his brother heatedly. "Would you cross the damn street already?"

Ludwig's feet stayed firmly planted at the curb, his eyes checking the other end of the street for automobiles. "It's not our turn to go."

"The road is six steps across and there's been no cars on it for a whole minute."

"But in Germany if it's not your turn even if there are no autos you wait."

"You can jaywalk in America, it's accepted," Gilbert explained.

"I was near hit by a car the day I found you, I shall not—"

Gilbert's patience for childishness had elapsed. He gave Ludwig a firm yank, and rather than stay in the middle of the road, Ludwig quickly scrambled across to beat Gilbert to the other side.

"How do you live with yourself for committing felonies if you can't even cross the street at a red light?" Gilbert joked.

Ludwig knew what heinous felony they had committed. They had drank a beer yesterday with lunch.

An odd realization accosted him as the distant light turned green. Gilbert knew not the language, but Ludwig knew not the culture. He knew in this case while crossing he probably would not have been hit by another speeding automobile, but he had stayed solely out of principal. If everyone broke the just rules when they thought there was no danger, society would fall apart.

After a while they arrived at the sidewalk that ran alongside Central Park. It appeared a nice enough park, equal with Berlin's Tiergarten. The park was a perfect rectangle of old trees and he could in no direction see the end of it. A troupe of homeless people lined it. There were a few cardboard signs. One read, _HARD TIMES ARE HOOVERING OVER US._

Gilbert seemed annoyed at the display of poverty. "What is this, America or Timbuktu?"

"Do you even know where Timbuktu is?"

"No. India? Peru?"

"Western Africa. What is Hoovering?" Ludwig asked.

"The American president for the last six months, _Mr-I-Know-Where-Timbuktu-is,"_ Gilbert said smartly.

"No, that's Hoover," Ludwig corrected.

"Oh?" Gilbert gestured at the multitude of signs. "Saw those before. I always thought his name was Hoovering."

"It's a pun. Hoover, hover. It means to float. Get it?"

"Ooh," Gilbert said.

"That crash happened and now it's over. It's supposed to get better. But it's only getting worse," Ludwig muttered.

"Well, think about it Lud. If I had 20 million dollars, and I lost 10 of it on the stock market or in the bank, I could still scrape by. We only went from being dirt poor to shit poor. It's the middle families who got everyone jobs -who buy our gin- that's taking it the worst. And they're the people who buy everything. Who give us jobs."

He decided that analysis was surprisingly astute, for Gilbert. But Ludwig's thoughts were broken when he almost stepped on a fluffy rodent. Bold little thing. It was dappled like the tree bark and had a fat hairy tail, and stopped on the base of the tree, about to go up, thinking he was frozen and camouflaged. The same creature was brown and foxlike in Germany, but here it was gray. Its fluffy tail straightened to balance in the breeze.

"What's he called?" Gilbert said, jerking his thumb at the animal. Gilbert made a habit of this, pointing and asking how to translate various objects, but he quickly forgot all but his favorite words.

"In English, that's called a schkvirrel," Ludwig said.

"A who now?"

"A skerril."

"Shkwerwel?" Gilbert attempted.

"No, a schkveeril," Ludwig corrected.

"Skvirril?"

"Sckweril."

"I said that!"

"Skwiwel."

"Schkerril," Gilbert said with impatient finality. "Good!"

"You fellas having some trouble with that squirrel?" a voice asked in English. It was a policeman who passed them on the sidewalk. He stood looking at them strangely, a tall bespectacled man with blue eyes and sandy yellow hair. His face was to Ludwig mildly familiar.

"Squirrel?" Gilbert whispered to his brother.

The policeman muttered something as he left. "Damn drunks. Apparently there's some booze to find."

* * *

-Natalya Braginska-

Natalya had wanted somewhere private, a bit intimidating, but a thought struck her that she might have gone somewhere a little _too_ private. In fact, private was a rather homey term. Central Park was then a forest where murderers lurked, filled with offal and blowing with trash. Glacier-dragged granite rocks the size of apartment complexes loomed like stony giants in the darkening sky. A distant cardboard Hooverville of homeless people coagulated by the lake, it was bigger than she remembered. The trees were deep old and thick: an oddly haunted-fairytale quality for somewhere in the middle of the densest city on the continent.

"Wasn't sure I'd find you. Lots of sheep, you know," a male voice said.

There were no sheep. There never were sheep. Just two young people standing alone in an empty overgrown field in a park at dusk.

Speckled and dotted orange and gray by the shadows of leaves Gilbert Beilschmidt stepped out from the forest shadows and into the meadow.

"How do you do, Gilbert," she said.

"How do you do, Natalya," he returned.

She switched back to German. "You got my cable. I wasn't sure you would."

He did not respond graciously to the formality. "What I want to know is how you learned where I live."

"I know someone who can find out where anyone lives," she said loftily. Ivan, she meant. He knew people who knew people in the police who had easy access to these things. As clear as the city records were, anyway. It was easy enough to bother one of his underlings.

"I wanted to talk to you. About the night you came to us," Natalya said.

"Yes?"

"Eliza and I think you got stabbed in a fight while you were bootlegging. I'm not going to ask what happened to the other guy."

Gilbert regarded her aloofly, but with an honesty she appreciated. "I don't see what there is to talk about."

"My brother is Ivan Braginsky."

Shocked eyes regarded her, recognizing the name. He was almost wrathful, like he was deceived. "Why do you live in a shit tenement then with a bunch of broke foreigners! You could live in a Penthouse with the power he has!"

She ignored the question. She was sick of it. "My brother saw you leave our apartment. He knows you supply and that hurts his business with his own customers. He didn't say if it was one of his men that attacked you, but warned us not to get too attached to you."

"Tell him to leave me alone. I ain't doing much more than mule a few bottles around. He's got bigger fish to fry."

"A parasite can survive as long as it lives unnoticed. You, Gilbert, have been noticed."

His nostrils flared, taking insult. "Where's a Rossiski woman like you learn a word like Schmarotzer? Not from _Das Kapital_, that's for sure."

"_Russkii_," Natalya corrected patiently. In the Russian language, there were two words for Russian. Russkii meant Russian as a cultural identity. Rossiski meant it as a political identity. Not that she expected a German to know that, but it was a very important difference to a woman in her situation.

"What do you want from me?" Gilbert growled.

"I came to tell you I think you should work for my brother. You could keep doing exactly what you're doing, and you'd have allies."

"I'm my own boss. I don't want to deal with anybody, especially Russian communists."

"You don't even know what communism is. The mafia, certainly, is not communist," Natalya reasoned.

"Please recognize I am much too greedy to ever cooperate with people who swallow that whole communist equality medicine," Gilbert said with a lofty smile. "I don't want to be equal with anyone lazier or dumber than I."

"You're from Berlin, right?" Natalya said abruptly.

He squinted at the sudden change of topic. "More or less."

"And, forgive me if I'm wrong, but Berlin is, among Germans, considered a communist city, is it not?"

"Listen, just because some fascist clowns in Munich think the Jews are the reason we lost the war, does not paint Berlin communist."

"Right, of course. But you would say that Berlin is the communist hotspot in Germany, if there was one."

Gilbert narrowed his eyes wordlessly, the only form of protest he could aim that was not a lie.

"Does doing away with racism and sexism and big money and religious heretics really sound so bad, Gilbert?"

"No, but it's been twelve years in Russia and hasn't worked. I also like the idea of keeping property."

Natalya chuckled. "And that's why you've uprooted. You thought you could be greedier in America than you could in Germany."

"Absolutely correct. I'm a greedy son of a bitch who will work his ass off to get rich. And that is exactly what I plan to do."

"America loves people like you. You're the perfect fool to swallow their dream. Gilbert, I don't know your situation, but you sure don't live with Mr. Gatsby on the West Egg. How's that been working out for you?"

"Just dandy," he replied standoffishly.

"You can't be half a gangster, Gilbert," she warned.

Gilbert took a breath. "_Miss Braginsky_—"

"_Please,_ I am not my brother. In the tradition of my country, and independent woman is politely referred to by the feminine form of her surname," she said with calming sweetness.

"Panna Braginska," Gilbert began regally, switching to the Slavic feminine in some trace of Polish he had picked up somewhere. She found it charming, though he said it with a snake's smile, and she knew better than to be honeyed by it.

"Gangster is such an American term. I had never thought it could apply to me. I am not a gangster, I'm a bootlegger. There's no politics, no power, no territory involved with it. I don't have a real job because I hate people, love booze, and don't speak English so I mule liquor around from warehouse to bar."

"There's not a difference anymore, Gilbert. It's serious business. Bad as heroin. There's gangs, it's organized. If you carry on like this, without siding with someone, you'll have no protection. And eventually you'll get arrested or killed."

"Killed? Listen lady. You don't want to threaten me in the middle of Central Park."

_Or what,_ her eyes dared. _Your knife is sitting on my kitchen table._ But she said nothing to acknowledge his threat.

"Whatever," Natalya growled. "It's not my job to save you."

"Indeed it is not."

Gilbert stared at her evenly, toughly, his arms crossed in an expectant _what-else-do-you-want_ gesture. He said nothing. She hated being looked at like that by a man she had tried to be generous to. She wondered why he bothered with this, and here she was standing being told by a near stranger to take off. Natalya muttered a goodbye, turned, and left Gilbert standing there alone.

Elizabeta was quick to mob her with questions when she returned to their apartment.

"He just yelled at me. If you want him to know something, tell him yourself. He feels guilty around you, he'll listen," she growled, setting herself down at the table.

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him, since he bootlegs for himself, he should just bootleg for Ivan. Then he could have steady work and not get killed, problem solved. But he got all_ political _and_ righteous_." She waved her hand and said the last words with particular disgust.

"I can't blame him. Ivan is exactly what you don't want to work for. A foreign mob boss who pretends to be a communist and uses it to disguise the fact that he is bleeding rich."

"How dare you say that about my family!" Natalya squawked.

"What? Isn't that why you don't like him?"

Natalya grunted acceptingly. Natalya respected Elizabeta's simple honesty. There was never any real malice in it but clearing up misunderstandings kept the two headstrong women from getting into real fights. They never assumed there was any attitude or aggression that wasn't shown.

Elizabeta was feeding herself a piece of bread with one hand. With her other hand, she was playing with the trench knife, spinning it into a tiny divet it had drilled in the table, staring at it intently.

"You gonna throw that thing in the bay yet?" Natalya asked. "I saw Lili playing with it last night."

"Yeah, I will. Oh- dear? Where _did_ you end up sending that telegram to Gilbert?" Elizabeta said offhandedly.

"Oh, you know, some nothing street in the old Deutschländl." Natalya gave her the address.

"Mm," Elizabeta hummed. With grace she swept up from the table and folded the knife into her hand. "About time I throw this in the bay then. See you later."

* * *

-Elizabeta Héderváry-

A man, -a boy?- opened the door on Nothing Street, Old Deutschländl. The same one that intervened when Gilbert had first tried to mug her. They must have been family, something about the space between their narrow eyes was akin. He was taller and more muscular than Gilbert, with a strong noble chin and a long straight nose. He was younger than her, she guessed between eighteen and twenty-one. He was strikingly handsome, much more so than the wolflike Gilbert. But there was a lack of creativity in his steel blue eyes that made him immediately undesirable.

"Hello?" he said in English, his left hand not leaving the door, poised to shut it in her face. He raised his thick light brown eyebrows expectantly.

"Hi. Um, I'm Elizabeta Hedérváry."

"Ludwig Beilschmidt. May I assist you?"

"Is Gilbert home?"

"No," he said, eyeing Elizabeta with added suspicion.

"Where is he?"

"Out."

She was getting nowhere. Probably he thought she was one of Gilbert's whores or drug running buddies. She shifted her feet. "Well, he left this with me. Thought he might need it."

She extended the parcel to Ludwig. She had neatly wrapped it in paper and tied it in bright red embroidery thread. Blood red. Gilbert would know exactly where it was from.

"I'll make sure he gets it. Thanks."

There was a glimmer of recognition in his eye for a heartbeat as he realized he had seen her before. The woman in the alley when he met up with Gilbert. He glanced back to his window to notice the darkening color of the sky. "Shall I walk you home, Miss?"

"I'll be fine. Thank you though." _Most criminals wouldn't want to end up like your brother that night. _But at least this Ludwig had the decency not to insist. He let her walk home by herself with little concern to who would attack a young woman in the night. Elizabeta quietly hoped Gilbert would not have need to use what she had returned.

* * *

-Ludwig Beilschmidt-

"Why did she find your knife?"

"I don't know. I had lost it. I was gonna get a new one."

"How do you_ lose_ a knife like that?!"

"I don't know. It was fuzzy, I'd assumed I'd just dropped it in the fight and it clunked down in the gutter."

Ludwig groaned deeply and ran his fingers despairingly through his hair. "Why in heaven she gave it back to you I cannot fathom. I would have thrown the evil thing away. Given your line of work you will be eventually questioned by the police, and when they find an American soldier's knife on a German, they're going to assume you killed him at some point and lock you up."

"Come. They can't arrest me for that today. Even if I _did_ fight in the war and kill this kid and take his knife, killing an enemy soldier isn't illegal."

"But it will cause the police to dislike you."

"If everyone knows you have a scary knife, no one wants to fight you. Have just a little trust in your big brother not to get caught, Ludwig," Gilbert reasoned.

Ludwig thought it would be much better if Gilbert had any other sort of knife, even an average one. Just not one that was possibly illegal and very possibly able to accidentally murder someone if it gave them a papercut.

"Is it lunchtime yet?" Ludwig grumbled.

"I'm hungry. Go buy a fish," Gilbert said. "A cheap one." And Gilbert threw some crumbly bed money at Ludwig.

"Let me cook it this time," Ludwig said.

"No no no, I insist! We'll try something new, we'll fry it with _beer_! This will be wholly my treat!" With a wink Gilbert added, "And I will take the glory for it."

Ludwig would much rather have something that did not end up raw, how Gilbert's impatient cooking usually resulted. Neither of the brothers were very good at cooking, but Gilbert, deciding he was better at it than Ludwig, who 'burned' things, had assigned himself all cooking duties and Ludwig was left to reign over the dish washing realm.

As he went to the market Ludwig still waited to make sure he crossed at the proper times whenever there were lights. It was past lunch time, he was sure most places would have their owners off doing other things by now. About two thirds of the stalls seemed packed up.

He saw what he wanted after a while. It was an abhorrently ugly looking fish. Flat like a leaf and sandy brown, with a twisted toothy mouth and both eyes asymmetrical, froglike and gooey on one side of its skull, like the animal was half way through evolving them to stay atop its head like a crocodile, but still had several thousand years to go. He did not know what they were called in English, but he knew they tasted well.

Unfortunately, no one was there to buy it from. Gilbert might have just taken it and walked down the street with a slimy fish in his hands, but Ludwig looked around, leaning on his toes into the darkness behind the stand front, before deciding waiting timidly like a child outside was pointless, and walked brazenly through the open door into the building behind it.

"Excuse me? Is anyone here?"

He collided shoulders with something and stepped quickly back. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness of oil lamps an odd little man came into vision, slender, who came only about up to Ludwig's chin. He was of a race he had not seen up close before. His face was round and his eyes were almond shaped. His hair and irises were black but his skin was white. He might have been twenty, he might have been thirty, it was difficult for Ludwig to discern.

"I'm so sorry!" Ludwig gasped. "Please excuse me for walking in, I wanted to ask if you were open."

"May I help you with something?" the man said in a strange voice, polite and neat, like a feline.

"I was hoping you would sell me one of the fishes outside," Ludwig said.

The man smiled his long black eyes in a catlike, friendly way. "Why would the answer of a wise seller ever be no?"

Ludwig wasn't even sure if this man owned this stand. But he walked outside with him and Ludwig pointed at his flat ugly brown fish.

"Please come in, I'll wrap it for you."

"How do you call this fish?"

"It's a flounder."

Ludwig could see it was a workshop, there were fishing boat things everywhere, and further in or on top was likely where the man lived. Then he saw something he was unsure if he was supposed to see. Upon the wall, curved elegantly like a bow, was a long asiatic one handed sword. It had a checkered handle and a white cloth was draped behind it, painted with a striped red rising sun. Its threatening elegance was exceedingly out of place in the dilapidated dark wood of the dim storeroom.

"Wow. That's..."

"Would you like to see it?" the fishman offered.

Ludwig paced nearer and the man raised a single strand of black hair from his head, and with no tension at all brushed it against the blade edge. The hair was cleaved cleanly in two.

"There is nothing on earth made by a man that is sharper than a katana," the man said informatively.

"Fascinating."

"I am from Japan, that is the make of this sword. I've come here to learn."

"A noble pursuit," Ludwig commended.

"Yes. America in this decade enjoys the highest standard of living in the world. I hope, one day, my country can be like this."

Noting Ludwig's youth, or perhaps his accent indicated his freshness to the land, the Japanese man continued informing. "You see, right now, it is illegal for anyone from Japan to come to the United States. I came before it was in effect, but all Japanese are currently excluded from the country."

"Rather insulting," Ludwig said sympathetically. He did not seem a bad fellow. His English was excellent. If all Japanese were civilized like him, he did not see them as a particularly dumb or lazy culture.

"Quite. But Japan now is very poor and very different from America. If they let us in, it is a rational fear my people would happily work for a much lower wage than Americans. Our country has very few natural resources."

"What resources do you lack?"

"On the surface, Japan is plentiful. It rains often. There are forests, mountains, farms. But underneath our earth is barren. No coal, iron, oil like most other countries. Just igneous rock. We fear we will fall behind our neighbors in this new Industrial Age. Tell me please, you are not of here either, where do you come from?"

"Germany. My name is Ludwig."

"You may call me Kiku." He pulled another piece of paper for the fish. "And tell me, Ludwig, what brings you here?"

"I had to leave University. I didn't want to burden my old parents. So I came to my brother here," he said. "But, I would like to learn too!" Ludwig spurted quickly.

"A university student. What did you study?"

"Engineering."

"Excellent. And what is Germany like?"

"Like here. Except we are more reserved, we do not smile at people we do not know, we don't cross the streets at red lights. Most people look like me. We like nature... We very much like to drink beer," he added, as a noteworthy difference.

"In Japan, we mostly eat fish and rice. Do you eat anything special in Germany?"

"We like meat and potatoes very much. But we haven't had the potato for very long. It comes from South America and a famous king of ours encouraged us to grow it. And in certain parts of Germany, to the north and east where it was called Prussia, it was also, often a very resource poor country. People used to starve."

They spoke for a while. Of German knights and Japanese samurai. Of wurst and potatoes and fish and rice. Of kingdoms and revolution and civil wars. Of innovation and transportation.

"I am interested in boats," Kiku said suddenly. "You say you studied engineering?"

"Yes."

Kiku nodded, and then he asked, "May I show you something?"

Suspecting Kiku would show him a sacred pagan Japanese idol, or maybe some other weapon or artwork, Ludwig quickly agreed.

Kiku reached up to a locked shelf. Out from it he pulled a rolled scroll. No, it wasn't as mysterious as a scroll, it was smooth and high quality western paper, old, but not more than a few years, thick and well cut. A blueprint of something. He spread it across a table and slid a paperweight on each side.

"This is a diagram of the USS Olympia. They decommissioned it seven years ago, an American battleship ship that helped seize the Philippines from the Spanish at the turn of the century. It's complicated, and I can't understand many of the terms or how it works. As an engineer do you think you could help me with it?"

"Quite so!" Ludwig replied, stricken by the compliment. He wasn't an engineer yet and he didn't know anything about American ships, but after dealing with Gilbert and his illegal affairs, he was happy to be in the accompaniment of an intelligent person. Even if he was a little different. Scholarship seemed rare among the people he had encountered.

"Well, in the most basic form engines work by combusting substances, in this case coal, -transported by conveyors from that room there- to heat water and have it expand into gas. The force of that expansion pressure moves these things here -that's a piston- to turn like so, which turns that gear there, which rotates that dowel, which spins that propeller, and through using water resistance as thrust, propels the ship forwards."

"May I please rest that fish in some ice for you?" Kiku asked, taking it graciously from Ludwig when he nodded, and the two eager young scholars turned studiously back to the diagram.

* * *

"You will come back next time you want fish, yes?" Kiku said.

"Naturally."

Kiku did something bizarre then. He handed him the fish, then faced him and performed a modest little bow, his arms pinned at his sides. Confused by the ritual, Ludwig clumsily returned it.

Gilbert had been waiting diligently at their apartment, his knuckles around a newspaper, his feet upon the opposite stool, a limp, extinguished cigarette forgotten in his mouth. "Took you long enough, it got any flies yet?"

He could tell Gilbert was displeased. There was a golf ball sized mountain of cigarette butts in an ash tray in front of him, when Gilbert usually considerately smoked outside so Ludwig did not have to breathe the smell. Now the small room was areek with tobacco and the air before the light bulb swirled with hazy tendrils of cigarette smoke.

"No," Ludwig answered stiffly, a bit embarrassed. "No flies."

"Good. I suppose fish will work as well for supper as it would have for lunch." Gilbert said with a bit of attitude, standing quickly up and seizing the paper wrapped fish from Ludwig. He started to unwrap it, and his dark eyes darted up at Ludwig questioningly.

"You bought two of these big fish?"

"No? I just bought one."

"There's two in here. Cleaned and everything, did you pay extra for that? I could have just done it."

"I guess he gave me a second one, I don't think he charged me," Ludwig said, noting now how Kiku had disappeared for a minute before he had returned with the wrapped fish and said goodbye. Ludwig returned Gilbert the extra money, the missing of which only amounted to the cost of one fish.

"Is this what took so long? He must not know how to clean fishes," Gilbert insulted. "Nor, how to count."

"I was talking."

Gilbert's mood seemed to have lightened considerably. "With a girl? Who, was she pretty? How old was she?"

"Er, no. With the fishmonger."

Gilbert sighed and put his beer down, expectations dashed with the answer.

"He is very smart. He is from Japan, I never met someone from Japan before."

"I haven't met someone from Luxembourg before but I wouldn't spend two hours talking to them."

"Maybe you don't have anything interesting to talk about," Ludwig said.

Gilbert ignored him. "What are we going to do with two of these big flounders? You have any friends you want to invite over, Ludwig?"

Truthfully Ludwig had no friends to invite over. He thought the closest things he had to friends in this country were the man standing right in front of him and the stranger in the fish market he had just finished talking to.

"Do _you_ have any friends?" Ludwig asked.

"None with a telephone to call, no."

They stood for a minute in their loneliness, shuffling their feet until Gilbert said, "Well I guess we'll deal with it somehow, eh?" He took the fish and began cutting them into halves and poured some oil and tipped a considerable amount of beer experimentally into the pan. There were some sliced potatoes Gilbert had chopped into strips and Ludwig decided this might not be so bad after all.

* * *

**Author's note:** Sorry this took a few months. Hopefully some of you are still around.

Celtic


	6. Chapter 6

-Gilbert Beilschmidt-

The cool drizzle of autumn had begun fizzing against the concrete of New York City, bouncing up into a gentle fine fog that dulled the shrieks of car horns in a hazy blanket of sepia. Gilbert left his apartment that day telling himself he was doing his usual errands, but though he would not admit it aloud, he was quietly hoping to run into someone else.

When he saw Elizabeta, she was sitting on her little gypsy blanket in a green dress. She had subtly lined her eyes with a black streak of kohl and a faded shawl that was likely once crimson to the point of iridescence, but had been washed a few times too many, was draped loosely on her shoulders. Gilbert approached her and opened his mouth to say something he hadn't yet thought of.

"See ya," Elizabeta said then, playing with a crystal ball of some sort, recognizing him but not looking up.

_"See ya?"_ he repeated the English phrase, baffled. His greeting died on his lips. "You wish to get rid of me so soon?"

"Szia. It means hello in Hungarian."

"Oh! Szia!" Gilbert greeted hastily. _And here I'd thought you were telling me to get lost._

She frowned down her nose at a spot of rain that had darkened on the cloth in front of the ball. More had begun to spear sparsely down. "Would you help me carry this stuff back, Gilbert?"

She stepped back. Helping uselessly as she gathered her knick-knacks in the cloth like the knapsack of a homeless man, Gilbert counted himself lucky. What a grand circumstance, it had started to rain just as he showed up. He was a proud man, and was running out of excuses to be around Elizabeta. But Gilbert had a reservation in again returning to her apartment. "Is Natalya home?" Gilbert said plainly. "I don't know if she is angry with me."

Elizabeta walked swiftly in the cold. "She won't be home yet."

"What's she doing in America? Why doesn't she go live in a collectivized farm shack with her boyfriend Stalin?"

Elizabeta spoke unfazedly. "You misunderstand. Natalya has fled the Soviet Union for her life."

If he had been drinking water he might have spit. The Communists were making a huge mistake if they expelled women like Natalya. "Why?"

"Natalya is Trotskyist. Stalin would have had her whole family killed. No, _erased_."

"What's the problem there with liking Trotsky? Ain't he a huge commie too?" Gilbert asked. He would admit his knowledge of Russian politics was... well, 'rusty' would imply he ever cared to start with.

"Leonid Trotsky was the soviet people's favorite to take over the USSR after Lenin died in 1924," Elizabeta educated. "Stalin fought for power instead and is terribly paranoid about anyone being Trotskyist, to the point that he'd arrest your whole family if he heard you were one. And being arrested means..."

"Die in a dunghole in Siberia?"

"Genau," she confirmed. _Exactly._

There was a deep part of Gilbert that found it tragic. To devote your life to loving your country and to be scorned by it. It made him feel somewhat guilty that his reasons for being in the United States were ignoble in comparison. Banishment for political opinions. Now wouldn't _that_ be something.

"You have returned something to me," Gilbert said in a more serious tone, staring down at the street, after they had walked a distance. "Why?"

"I thought if you do something stupid again, you should at least have a fighting chance before you make your contribution to humanity by eliminating yourself from the gene pool."

That last part sounded like Ludwig. "Gee, thanks," he said sarcastically.

"I trust you won't use it to mug old ladies."

"Right."

They arrived at her apartment a few minutes later. "So," Gilbert declared, bouncing once on his heels and glancing attentively about the rain-dark room. "Where's this," crap "_stuff,_ go?"

"Just put it anywhere, I'll sort it out." She turned on the light and quickly layered on a sweater and shivered once. Gilbert set the bundle gently on the table.

"Lame winters, you must have had in Hungary," he noted.

"You don't wear what I do. I'm not going to make any money here dressed like an Eskimo nun." She then placed her coinpurse upon the table, which landed with a hefty_ clink._ Gilbert raised his eyebrows.

"You know what you should try?" Gilbert baited.

"What?"

"Bootlegging."

"I'd never!" Elizabeta squawked, offended at the suggestion.

"Women are amazing at it!" Gilbert exclaimed. He seated himself poisedly on the bench. "Three times better than a man. I can't wear a hoop skirt, see, but if I could, I could fit whole cases of stuff under it. Do it in broad daylight! And you could have an excuse for walking funny because women wear heeled shoes. And a cop will never inspect a lone woman: it's improper, the cop would be accused of indecency. It's the only job in the city where a woman can make so much more than a man. Except for_, well..."_

"I'm not a criminal, Gilbert," Elizabeta reminded tersely.

"But you are dishonest. You do that gypsy thing, and you aren't a gypsy or know the first thing about them."

"That started out as a joke. I'd never thought I would have to keep doing it," she said with a jab of bitterness hiding a hint of shame.

"I can connect you with someone if you're interested," he said knowingly, weaving his hands together in a mocking pantomime of a novel villain.

She did not return his jest. "No thanks."

On the balls of her feet she paced lightly away towards the window and swung it creakily open to bare the gray sky. He admired her narrow backside for a moment before quickly diverting his gaze lest she turned around. She seized an old pie tray dotted with crumbs and set it on the windowsill, where a knowing pigeon fluttered clumsily to it.

"I have a real job, you know," she clarified. "I don't just do this."

"You do? Why can I find you ever few days?"

"Because they're cutting hours," she said. _"And _you must be looking too hard."

"You speak three languages, and they don't let you do whatever women's work you do?"

Elizabeta shrugged. "Speaking three languages does not make you better at working textile machines. Money is down, and immigrant women are at the bottom of the totem pole."

"Suppose so. Hard for your type."

"Tell me about it. Why Americans accept German immigrants but not eastern Europeans is beyond me."

"That would be easy." Gilbert replied surely.

"Yeah?" Elizabeta tested, folding her hands and a suspicious smile tightening her lips. "Why don't you educate me?"

"It's the countries we come from. Americans like Germans because we're hardworking like Americans. At least when we're not sinking the Lusitania and sending secret telegrams to Mexico."

"Explain to me the differences of our home peoples."

"To start, Germans look more like Americans."

She tilted her head and blinked her eyes acceptingly. "Ok."

"Hungarians are pushy and loud and show their emotions easily. Americans admire stoicism and adaptability, which is why they like Germans."

"Continue."

"Religion. Most true Americans are Protestant, Hungarians, you said, and most Southern Europeans they don't like, are Catholic."

"Religion is not a main factor today," she said. "And southern Germany is quite Catholic."

He shrugged. "And Hungarians are Mongolian, or something."

Her humoring patience had elapsed. "Do I look Chinese to you?"

"No. Well, I don't know. Maybe a little."

Elizabeta snorted. "_You're_ the Hun."

"You're the Hun. Do you know what they call your country in English? _Hun_gary."

"Do you know what Americans called Germans in the war? Huns," Elizabeta retorted.

"Yes, but I'm not actually descended of Attila the Hun. Or the Tatars or the Mongols or any of those that set up camp in Hungary. Do I look it to you? With my blond hair?"

"You don't have blond hair. You have white hair."

Gilbert glanced in the patinaed mirror she tacked on the wall and pawed at a lock self consciously, frowning. He thought it could be blond. Maybe not a strong lion yellow blond like Ludwig. But a silvery northernmost blond. The blond of a creature who lived at the crown of the world, where the sunlight was too faint to dye it with color.

"I mean, I look like a real American. I pass. So long as I don't open my trap," he declared with a smile, crossing his arms.

She snorted. "Not for a second."

"Liar," Gilbert accused without any real malice. "Why not?"

He felt a sudden pressure tighten around his throat, and with a look down realized Elizabeta had snatched his simple dark scarf and yanked it taught against his skin. She released it after a moment and it fell from her thin, tapered witchlike fingers. "Take a guess."

"What's so toxic with a scarf?" Gilbert asked.

"American men don't wear scarves. It's considered effeminate."

"Effeminate!" he balked. "Effeminate!? I shouldn't be penalized if these God a'fearin, red neck lumberjacks a don't know how to dress themselves properly. If it's cold, I'll wear a scarf. Just as any sane person would gloves."

"Not an American man. They're more rugged."

"Well at least I can rest in the solace that you're no American," Gilbert added smugly.

_"I could act quite American,"_ she said pointedly in English. She somehow relinquished her accent in favor of something cowboy sounding Gilbert didn't well understand. "Ah say, ah kin be emerican kweit well."

His fingers stretched lazily forward to swish the air by the tail of her hair. "Your hair is much too long to pass. American women cut it to their ears."

"Why do they do that?"

"American women find it daring."

"I'm quite daring, even with my long hair. More so than any of these spoiled flappers."

_Yes,_ he thought. _You quite are._

His eyes traced over to the bird pecking at the crumbs on the windowsill. The quiet was beginning, and he felt he should soon leave. Already it was improper he was here so long without a reason. He opened his lips to speak, then stopped, then began again. "I was wondering Elizabeta, if you wanted to get some ice cream sometime."

Her lips trembled and her brow furrowed. Her hands stilled when she realized what he was asking. "Ice cream?"

"Yes. You've had it before haven't you?"

"Sure, but, it's mostly children who eat ice cream, no?"

"Adults can enjoy it too."

"Fair enough," she said tilting her head. "So long as you're paying. When did you have in mind?"

"Tonight. I know a place. I'll come by at eight?"

"Quite fine."

And Gilbert dismissed himself from Elizabeta's apartment, feeling quite pleased with himself.

* * *

-Elizabeta Héderváry-

Elizabeta thought it sweet that such a rugged person had chosen to take her to an ice cream parlor. She had of course thought it ridiculous initially, for a man to suggest such a childish thing. She almost felt embarrassed for the man when he had asked her. It seemed the sort of date a fourteen year old would ask of his sweetheart before he knew how to kiss. But she realized then its symbolism. Elizabeta was working two jobs, -including pretending to tell fortunes to idiots- unmarried, and was working away what youth she had. He had offered her some fun, some whimsical moment of childhood. He was more poetic than he looked, this Gilbert. Plus, there was nothing wrong with ice cream. It was in fact quite delicious, though she'd only had it a few times.

With Gilbert walking beside her she sat herself down at a spinny, chrome, red leathered bar stool. To her right was a grandfather and a six year old, who oogeled at her curiously from behind a Sundae. _What are you looking at,_ she thought.

Gilbert had brushed past her, ignoring the barstools and gaily dressed teenaged employees with ugly starch white sailor hats in the front counter. He strided towards a little tin door in the side of the shiny metal clad building for the employees to swing in and out.

"Gilbert, where are you going?"

He looked at her, wondering why she sat, as if sitting were the most bizarre thing to do to a chair. "Come on."

She got up from the stool and followed him to the swinging door. He must have known the owner, maybe there was a heated little nook the employees took their breaks in he could eat in. He led her down a flight of stairs in a narrow hallway with a thick door at the end. He was many steps ahead, but the echoes in the narrow hall carried his voice up.

"Klopf klopf! Schulz, it's me!" he called in his musical German, knocking on the door.

After a moment the door opened half way and a smiling head and torso slid out. "Herr Beilschmidt! Welcome! What have you brought?"

"A friend."

_"Eine Freundin?"_ the man repeated excitedly, grinning. "No juice tonight? Hopefully she's pretty-"

"Enough! She's coming!" Gilbert hissed at the voice. Gilbert looked quickly back at Elizabeta, who had finished climbing down the stairs, beamed, and opened the door grandly for her. With slow suspicion she strode through and stopped with her mouth hanging agape.

"You dog, I wanted ice cream," she pouted.

"Really? I'll buy you some if you want."

All Elizabeta had wanted was some damned ice cream and he presented her with _this._ There were tables and strangers and music. And behind the counter along the wall were row after row upon column after column of full glass liqueur bottles gleaming like muted hard candy in the light. And to the sides of that, wooden barrels with metal spigots. Of all the things, Gilbert Beilschmidt had brought her to a speakeasy. A speakeasy in the cave basement of an ice cream parlor.

Gilbert stamped his shiny black boot on the springy ground and grinned at her. "You know a place is good when they spread sawdust on the floor."

"Oh Isten," she groaned. "Gilbert, are we gonna get deported..."

"Relax! They only deport communists, remember?"

She should have trusted her premonitions that something as innocent as ice cream was out of Gilbert's character. Even Gilbert himself seemed surprised she had not expected 'seedy basement speakeasy' when he said 'ice cream.' But if she was supposed to turn around and leave, she did not feel compelled to. A ceding groan escaped her chest.

She was never quite sure how women were expected to act in American culture while drinking. She knew that twenty years ago, no self respecting American woman of any make or color would ever be caught in a saloon. But oddly enough, now that it was illegal and the women were already breaking the constitution, they were not going to stop based on what men thought of them. The speakeasy was a third filled with twenty year old white flapper women. She didn't know them, they might have been American and most of them richer than her, but Elizabeta liked them anyway. Their short hair and boxy boyish dress and big flapping rainboots. She thought that the outlaw of alcohol was a good thing in this aspect, of outlawing the double standard between men and women.

"Hey, you like vanilla? It's my favorite. So I thought you'd like it too. But that's kinda plain for most people, and you seem like a strawberry kind of lady. So I had them put candied strawberries on top," Gilbert babbled, breaking her thoughts to hand her an ice cream in a glass.

"Thanks Gil. That's great."

She had begun to eat. "Do you know when I first encountered ice cream?"

"When?"

"It was on Elis island, they gave a little ball of it to everyone when we got here. But we'd never seen ice cream before, so we thought it was frozen butter. We spread it on the bread."

Gilbert started cackling. "You poor, dumb immigrant."

"It wasn't that bad!" she defended. "But it's much better this way."

Gilbert motioned for a pair of drinks. He took his glass and wrapped his palms around it like it was a warm coffee mug, looking at her seriously. She felt an odd prod of nervousness when he looked her deeply in the eye, he never did it often, he seemed to act like most of the time he was above giving someone his full attention. "Never have I ever attempted to mug anyone before. You have to understand I'm very opportunistic. I don't usually rob people. I saw you and thought I'd give it a shot."

"It's a very American thing to do, mug people," Elizabeta noted, scooping a strawberry. "If a European wants your money, he'll slip your wallet from your coat and he'll be gone before you miss it. An American will challenge you directly."

Gilbert snickered. "Is that your subtle way of calling us Europeans cowards?"

"No, just an observation," she said innocently.

"What would you rather? Someone to pickpocket you or mug you?" he asked trivially.

"A pickpocket would be less scarring. But if someone challenged me outright, like you did, at least I have a chance."

Gilbert snorted diffusely. "Chance to get cut up."

"Or, for me to pull Lili's gun."

"You couldn't have expected me to think a woman would pull a gun. And if I was dumb enough to actually try something nasty, one of us would be dead, the other a murderer with a measly extra two dollars to their name. Not ideal for either of us."

"In the end, you chose not to disembowel me, and I chose not to shoot you: so I say we're not completely despicable people," Elizabeta concluded.

"To that, I drink!" Gilbert praised enthusiastically. He brought his glass high to shimmer in the low light. "Prost!"

"To not completely despicable people," she toasted. "Egészségére."

Gilbert's laughing eyes betrayed a whisper of thought before he drank. _What the hell kind of_ _word is that?_

The alcohol burned like fire down her esophagus. She wrinkled her nose and stifled a cough. Gilbert was too mannered to comment, but Elizabeta considered herself a stalwart woman, and too proud to be seen as weak and delicate by a brute like Gilbert, even in this environment. In her embarrassment she felt she should explain herself. "It's been like, a while since I've drank," she said lamely.

"How long?" he asked, tilting his head like a bird.

"Since I've been here. Three years."

"Damn! Are you okay?"

"Oh yes, Hungarians, we drink like oxen..." she mumbled, her eyes glazing and a gentle fuzz filling the back of her mind.

Elizabeta was much happier with ice cream in her. And Gilbert, apparently, with peanuts, as he kept taking them from the little wooden dishes lined up along the bar. They were probably the only fools in the place trying to dance the Polka to jazz music. They played this game with a bunch of strangers where they had to throw a thing at a thing, and if they missed the thing they had to drink a thing. Elizabeta and Gilbert both missed the thing a lot, and Gilbert, alight with the warmth of human kindness, drank a lot. She did not know how much time had passed. Gilbert had told her sometime she didn't have to drink anymore if she didn't want to. She didn't remember if she had stopped or not.

She hiccuped. "Y...ya think they can make an ice cream float with vodka? Like how they do with Coca-Cola, but with alcohol instead?"

"We are trying that now," he declared. He had thumped upstairs, and returned with some more ice cream in a glass mug filled up halfway. They started pouring a bottle of a something that smelled vaguely of formaldehyde in it, then took two big metal spoons and started mashing the lot of it up, giggling like school children making mud pies.

"You g'first," she said.

"No, no, you go," Gilbert dared.

"This is the grossest thing I've ever eaten." Eaten. Drank. She wasn't sure what verb to use. One ate ice cream, which was the good part. One drank alcohol, which was the nasty part. Drank. Drank would be the better verb.

He was spooning some into his mouth. His expression was thoughtful, fixing into a frown when he rested the spoon down to cling against the glass rim. "You think we could set it on fire?" he asked.

Gilbert revealed a light from his breast and suddenly they were left with a mug that was flaming on the surface like a torch, staying confined within the rim of the glass but blazing like Krakatoa. The firelight reflected back in the curvature of their wide eyes, and on their teeth as revealed by gaping mouths.

"THIS WAS A BAD IDEA."

"WHAT THE HELL WAS IN THAT?"

The alcohol burned orange and the ice cream browned. They tried blowing at it but it only got worse. By instinct she wanted to throw the hazardous thing to the straw covered ground, but befuddledly decided that was a bad idea if the whole place was set on fire. People were starting to stare, and the Barman's piggish face had turned beet-red as he began marching over.

"Haha! Wow, what dumb looking foreigners we are!" Gilbert crowed, amused with himself.

"Speak English when embarrassin yourself. You're makin us look bad," Elizabeta said.

"You _knowst_ ih kann nicht Englisch shpreaken whenn I drunken am," he whined in half of either language.

_Not much worse than sober,_ she thought.

"That's quite enough!" the barman said in English, yanking Gilbert by the collar as one would a disobedient son. Gilbert was still holding the flaming chalice in one hand which jerked and spilled some drops on the ground.

"Come back tomorrow Gil and if you bring twice what you drank, I'll be happy. Don't set my place on fire. I don't want to explain all this to Crazycop Jones when it burns like an booze-soaked haybale."

_Please don't fight, please don't fight_, Elizabeta thought.

Gilbert set their experiment down on their table with remarkable clarity. It had stopped smoldering now, and the remaining fried cream smelled good enough to eat. Her mouth was watering and she really wished he had asked to bring it with them. Gilbert inclined his head, tipped his hat, and gestured for Elizabeta's hand.

"I guess when things are set on fire, it's sign of a night well done?" he said gently to her with all of his attention. "I'll walk you home."

Her clarity of thought had returned to her with the dark night air outside of the parlor. She was looking nervously about. She could not believe what she had done. A hundred fears were racing through her mind. She had just committed a crime against the highest law of the United States. With someone she knew for weeks, a criminal, at an illegal speakeasy. "What if the police find us blue? Can they arrest us?" Elizabeta worried aloud as she walked the dark streets.

"There are several reasons we shan't be bothered, my good madam," Gilbert replied with drunken smoothness.

"Care to list?" she prompted.

"One, there's two of us, and one of him. Could be dangerous. Two, cop palms are well greased here." Bribes, he meant. "And three, we always speak in German. You'd feel kinda awkward going up to a pair speaking in a language you don't know. Better he just pretends not to see us."

"And you have that big knife with you now, probably," she remembered.

"Yes. You got your Lueger tucked in your brassiere somewhere?"

"_Maybe,_" Elizabeta giggled coquettishly, with a knowing smile that said yes. A complete lie. She was unarmed and was too smart to tell anyone. Why would she bring a weapon to get icecream? Had she known Gilbert would actually be trying to get her drunk, and would now be walking home alone in the dark empty streets, she would have tied some sort of shank on her thigh doubly fast. She could already hear Natalya berating her for her helplessness. At least she wasn't so drunk as to be stupid enough to tell the truth.

"Interesting," he said with deliberating slowness. His eyes might have flashed to the fabric near her breast, or the drink might have caused her to imagine it.

"Do you know where we're going, because I'm lost," Elizabeta said.

"Oh, sure. I think," he said with a laugh.

After some minor stumbling around, in twenty short minutes the drunken pair managed to find their way back to Elizabeta's apartment. He stood on her doorstep in the dark hall, his eyes slightly hooded and lips parted in thought, obviously debating something, but he thought better of doing it. Releasing a breath he embraced her with one arm and bade her goodnight.

* * *

-Gilbert Beilschmidt-

Gilbert stumbled home in the intermittent spotlights of humming streetlamps, feeling emotionally befuddled. Maybe he should have kissed her. But worse he could not believe Elizabeta seemed surprised when he revealed they weren't quite getting ice cream. A small prick that might have been guilt or embarrassment poked between his ribs. _Whatever!_ the impatient voice in his head quieted his doubts. Regardless of how gentlemanly of him it was, that was probably the most exciting thing that prude had done in three years.

He took notice of the silhouette of a stray dog pawing at something on the ground. It must have been the alcohol, for Gilbert usually let nature do her thing. But emotion seized him as if struck by lightening when he heard a frantic avian peeping poking between the barking. On the street glimmered a glass coca-cola bottle. He seized it by the neck and sent it shrieking through the air, where it smashed into shards like a firework at the paws of the dog. "Hau ab!" he snarled. Get lost!

Yipping, the dog galloped away, its dewclaws clicking on concrete, its tail folded tight like a switchblade against its concave stomach.

Glass crunching under boots Gilbert approached where the dog stood. A pigeon lay flattened in a pool of mud, blood, and slobber, with featherdown scattered around the small body like flowers on a grave. Its thin long neck was hooked at an odd angle, its wings splayed and stringy. It had a big athletic chest which heaved, and it twitched its one hurt wing and shivered like a malnourished chihuahua. Its feathers were soaked in grime. As most pigeons, its irises were a familiar bloody red. Gilbert grimaced.

"You sorry bastard."

Surely it would be eaten by a cat by dawn. It opened one dying twitching red eye feebly.

"Oh, hell, I..." Gilbert groaned in defeat. With a sigh he squatted low to weave his fingers underneath the bird. It shivered once, but otherwise did not fight. He walked home in the dark, staring down at the warm thing occasionally. He was not entirely sure how he would help it, but he trusted he would not regret the decision to save it when he woke up sober.

"Well well well, what do we have here?"

Gilbert froze.

"I've seen this one around before, and he's not one of ours. No, the thieving, white-haired stoat does not belong to us."

The voice was in English. Gilbert turned slowly. A well dressed man in a pinstriped blue suit a notch shorter than him stood in the center of the sidewalk, and a matching fedora was tipped over his eyes, draping them in shadow. Gilbert recognized him by his flamboyant dress- definitely from southern Europe, and this was the second in command. But both men had already made grave mistakes. Gilbert, in his distraction, had strayed out of neutral territory. The other was too important to be walking at night alone.

"You're on the wrong side of town," Lovino Vargas noted in English.

Gilbert narrowed his eyes hostily. But it was in an even voice he spoke. "I go home."

The man squinted, raising his chin to appraise Gilbert's hands. His rehearsed tone became less suave and more of a sneer. "What the hell are you doing with that? You that hungry?"

Gilbert neither changed his expression nor offered explanation. He lowered his cupped hands slightly, prepared to set his cargo aside. Vargas was without his cronies, and Gilbert doubted he would risk a one to one fight. But on the first reach of Vargas anywhere, for knife or gun, Gilbert would be ready.

Receiving no answer, Vargas studied Gilbert's body appraisingly. "You _empty_?"

Empty. Other than what alcohol was inside him, Gilbert carried nothing but a bird. He lowered his chin in a half nod.

"Then get the hell out of here!" Vargas shrieked. A loud dog, who had no teeth. Gilbert understood the real reason he was dismissed. Coward. The prideful leisure of his steps displaying his contempt for being spoken to that way, Gilbert turned, cusping the pigeon, and continued slowly home.

* * *

-Ludwig Beilschmidt-

For whatever reason in the darkness before dawn, Gilbert stumbled home drunk. The recently awakened Ludwig sniffed twice. Tonight was not one of Gilbert's usual clandestine outings. "Why do you smell like formaldehyde? And... burned hair?"

Gilbert ignored the question, painfully flicked on the humming light, and with the grace and authority of a military commander with a clubfoot deposited a half-dead something on the table. "He's kinda cute, ain't he?"

Ludwig moved to get a better look at the mixture of mud and feathers, a parentlike suspicion drawing over him. "The landlord doesn't allow pets," Ludwig cited aloofly.

"So what. Some tenants even have these slobbery poop factories called children."

Ludwig started an objection. "You cannot take care of a bird! It needs exercise, it can't be trained! It will give us lice and stink up the place! There are important things we need to be investing our time in, and playing veterinarian is not one of them! You cannot go picking lost causes off the street!"

Gilbert's voice was calmly quiet. "Picked you off the street, didn't I?"

That shut Ludwig.

"I'll weave him a basket from wicker tomorrow, and that will be his cage," Gilbert said, delicately preening the bird's spoon shaped head with his fingers and a rag he had doused with warm water.

"What are you going to feed it?"

"It's a pigeon. We'll give it our scraps."

Ludwig did not enjoy the use of the 'we' pronoun. He knew he definitely would not share his food with that half dead maimed parasite infested disease bomb.

"I'll name him Gilbird," Gilbert said proudly, cleaning the vermin attentively. Shame, when something was named it was much harder to get rid of.

"English name, I know," Gilbert continued to a not particularly caring Ludwig. "Gilvogel doesn't quite carry the pun, mm?" He scratched behind its head. The tannish feathers were white and downy underneath, and the tawny bird probably would have hopped away from such molestation if it had the strength, but all it could do was look at Gilbert threateningly.

After a moment of frowning, Gilbert announced, "We gotta set his wing back. It's twisted 'round the wrong way."

"I think you are a little buzzed to perform operations on creatures with hollow bones," Ludwig observed.

Gilbert had ignored him and spread a rag on the table, and positioned the pigeon belly up upon it, holding it down with his palm and fingers spread to cage around its chest. "Hold him down, will ya?"

With his shoulders raised anxiously, suspecting they would kill it, but unwilling to invoke Gilbert's wrath, Ludwig did as told. Ludwig restrained the bird and pressed an additional two fingers to the joint of its unhurt wing, holding it flat. Gilbert poised his hand above it and with an instinctive fear of helplessness the bird began to kick its feet. Gilbert murmured comfortingly and inflicted a motion with his hand Ludwig did not know where he had learned. The bird answered with a series of frantic peeping coos before it fell quiet.

"There you go," Gilbert announced sweetly. With its remaining strength the terrified creature stumbled a half step away from the sound of Gilbert's voice before toppling clumsily onto its breast, apparently ok.

"Where is it going to stay tonight? We can't just let it wander the apartment," Ludwig said.

Gilbert frowned in thought and paced the room in search. He held the Pickelhaube confusedly, turning it in his hands, but upon the strike of a thought, with a sudden fervor he stepped to the other side of the room. He seized their breadbox triumphantly: an object plenty big enough to fit several birds. He shook it out and found only crumbs.

"Will it suffocate in there?" Ludwig asked.

"Nah. Damn thing's kaputt. Can't even keep the bread from going stale."

"Will the bird...?" Ludwig left the remainder of the question unsaid. Pigeons had a reputation for certain bodily functions.

"Eugh, definitely. I'll scrub the whole thing out in the morning. Good thing we ain't got any food."

Gilbert carefully placed the shivering tan smear of dust in the breadbox. To make doubly sure it did not suffocate, Gilbert balled up a napkin and propped it under the lid. The bird lowered its red eye to look out the crack suspiciously at the men for a moment, but then the head disappeared and he only saw pink scaled feet as it capitulated to its exhaustion.

"Good night, Gilbird," Gilbert sang tenderly. With a grand stooping motion he planted a beer scented kiss upon the box.

_Glad he cares about someone's sleep,_ Ludwig thought gruffly as his eyes flickered to note the gray of dawn sliding through the window.


	7. Chapter 7

-Ludwig Beilschmidt-

"Gilbert, I'm home," he greeted obviously.

The usual scene did not greet him.

Gilbert was crouched with an empty bottle. An eight paged magazine was spread on his lap. Gilbert's pupils were dilated in lust and his eyes were black with rage. He heard whatever magazine Gilbert had collide with the wall by his head. A topless woman fluttered from the pages.

"Weren't you at the damn library? Scram!"

Ludwig, alarmed and embarrassed, closed the door and strolled down the staircase. He would be somewhere else that morning. Yes, he would give Gilbert his space. Irritation flooded him as he pushed out the door to the complex and took the steps two at a time. On the final step down onto the city sidewalk, he felt something crash into him.

Horrified, the young man stepped backwards. A schoolgirl was knocked flat on the sidewalk when he had taken the steps so fast. Hot guilt swept down his spine.

"Oh Miss, are you alright?"

She stayed flat on the concrete for an expressionless second. Her shocked eyes stared sightlessly. School books were scattered around her like flowers on a grave. She was petite, an American might have called her five feet tall.

"Miss?" He took one of her hands in his and the other around her back to help her stand. Which jitteringly, she did. Then they both jolted at the same time back to the ground to begin rapidly gathering the books.

"I'm so sorry, I was rushing, I wasn't being careful," Ludwig blathered as he gathered the books. "I am such a brute."

"No, it's my fault. I was daydreaming and walking too near to the buildings," the girl said.

She had her feathery blonde hair cropped short around her ears, and a violet ribbon in her hair. And opaque, shy, doelike green eyes that didn't dare meet him for more than a second before flashing away. She might have been fifteen or so. She was beautiful in an elfish sort of way.

He looked at the first of the books in his hands. It did not quite fit her image. "Er, Macbeth?" he read the title doubtfully.

"Yes."

Macabre tastes, the elf had.

He was about to hand it back to her when he saw her knee. It was scraped and bloody from her fall on the pavement. He felt guiltily at the sight. It took him a few punches in the face to draw blood from that Irishman at the bar, and here he had gone been a brute without meaning to.

"Please, let's go to my apartment. We can wash up your knee," Ludwig offered. Gilbert's habits be damned. He shouldn't be allowed to monopolize the place anyway. In the face of someone hurt because of him, Ludwig's previous inclination to give Gilbert his space evaporated.

"I'm Ludwig," he said abruptly, realizing he had best say his name if she was coming inside.

"Lili," the girl stated.

Gilbert had better be finished by now. Ludwig walked slowly and knocked twice tentatively on his door with one thick middle knuckle. "Gilbert? May I come in?"

He heard a grunt 'yes' from inside.

Lili looked at him interestedly after he spoke. "You speak German?"

"Yes? You understood?" Ludwig asked eagerly.

_"Naturally. I come from Vaduz," _said the girl.

He wondered where this Vaduz she said she came from was. _Fadootz._ He certainly had not heard of it before. Maybe it was in Switzerland or Austria. She spoke strangely, perhaps this Lili was from the Tyrol, something like that.

Gilbert was standing when he came in. The room was immaculately clean and nothing was out of the ordinary.

"Sorry, I had just thought you were going to be away for a while..." His guilty explanation pivoted sharply as Gilbert caught sight of the girl. "You have brought a guest?

"Yes, she scraped herself outside." _Because of me,_ he wanted to add, though he knew Gilbert would realize he had fault in it if he had brought her here.

Gilbert studied the girl, his gray eyebrows squinted studiously, for longer than he thought was necessary for a simple stranger. Ludwig felt uneasy for Lili being stared at so by a man like Gilbert. Finally the elder spoke.

"Well, let's get you cleaned up," he said to her directly. Ludwig found it rude how Gilbert assumed it was appropriate to speak to her in German.

Gilbert took a cloth and dampened it at the sink. Then from an unmarked bottle he procured a few drops of what Ludwig knew was liqueur. Gilbert should know better than to risk that around strangers, even to help them. She couldn't smell it, but she would certainly realize it was alcohol when it stung. But Gilbert did not seem to care about keeping the secret in front of this one.

Lili sat in a wooden chair, her thin knobby pink stork knees bent, her toes resting on the floor but her legs were too short for her heels to do anything but hover in the air.

Gilbert knelt before her, gently hovering his rag above her skin and looking at her. "It will sting a bit," he said softly.

"That's fine," she said. Gilbert seemed not at all surprised when she returned his German.

He carefully dabbed her knee. "There we are. Looks not so bad now. Would you like something to drink?"

Ludwig wondered why he asked. They had three things to drink: sink water, beer, and apparently something with proof high enough to be rubbing alcohol.

"No thank you," Lili answered.

"We have some good Brötchen too. Perhaps I can interest you in one?" Gilbert offered.

Drink was one thing, but Ludwig wondered what kind of devil had possessed the incessantly gluttonous Gilbert into giving food away to strangers. Especially ones that were too young for him to have any romantic or business interest in.

The feathery Gilbird however, seemed interested in the bread rolls, which were now re-allowed their rightful place in the scrubbed breadbox. Gilbert had determinedly built the bird a cage by stripping some unfortunate willow trees in a park of their branches. With a few feet of twine, a handful of tiny nails, and several old newspapers lining the bottom, the cage was complete. But the creation looked more like a cubish rabbit hutch than a dainty bird cage; something that Ludwig found poetically fitted to the misshapen, dirty, simultaneously fat and starved looking ugly lump that was Gilbird. Ludwig remained still unsure if the bird would survive. But in the day it had lived there, it did not seem as nervous and jittery around the humans, and seemed pleased sleeping and quietly watching their activities as long as it was watered and fed.

"No, I best go right away, Mr. Beilschmidt," Lili said.

_Mr. Beilschmidt? _Ludwig looked at his brother sharply, and Mr. Beilschmidt shook his head in an 'I'll explain later' gesture.

"You are certain?" Gilbert asked the girl.

"Yes. Erzi and Nata will be disappointed if they hear I'm late for school."

"Why don't you walk Miss Lili out then, Ludwig," Gilbert instructed.

_Nata._ The name that signed the telegram. Clearing his throat, Ludwig straightened awkwardly and opened the door for the young woman. As soon as it closed, he spoke.

"You have met my brother Gilbert before?"

"Oh yes, he came to our apartment one night not long ago. He had, cut, himself, on something. He knew one of my roommates somehow."

Interesting. Must have been the arm incident.

"Roommates? You do not live with your parents? You are yet so young."

"Yes. Well." She closed her eyes and raised her eyebrows. She might have been a bit offended.

"Sorry," Ludwig said into his collar. Maybe her parents had died.

As they exited the building, Ludwig was careful to tread the steps only one at a time. "I'll walk with you to the school," he announced, truthfully having no idea where the school was. But he was carrying her books, and after tripping over her earlier, he decided it was best he at least be of some use.

"Sure, it's this way."

Upon arriving Ludwig found the American high school to be a terrifying place. He seemed to have forgotten an important aspect of schools: the inhabitants. It was swarming with kids a few years younger than him, but in his stay in New York so far he had scarcely allowed himself to encounter any people his own age. He found the American teenager to be dirty, thin, and gangish. They hung around entrance steps in droves smoking cigarettes and having spitting contests. Lili looked the most civilized of any of them.

"You go to _school_ with these people?"

"Yes of course."

"You mean, they don't sort the university destined sort out from the other students? The ones who want to be carpenters and plumbers and things? And give them each a different high school?"

"Of course not. They used to have separate schools for certain students in this country, but they got rid of that a century ago. Up north, at least. Are you alright Ludwig?"

"Oh, yes," he said quickly, straightening himself. He carefully returned her stack of books.

She smiled gently. A stringent bell rang from above the door of the school. "See you, Ludwig."

He nodded. He debated saying 'sorry again for stepping on you,' but decided he was better off not reminding her. "Bye Lili."

Lili sprang fawnlike up the steps and hurried into the school. He turned and wove through the throngs of advancing students, mindful to avoid touching any of them. When Ludwig arrived back at their apartment, he asked Gilbert about lunch. Ludwig quietly wanted to visit someone, and suggested buying a fish.

Gilbert paced the room as he gave his old man speech. He went on about European peasants 500 years ago who would eat a rabbit once a year on Easter. They had scarcely any money, and now Ludwig wanted to eat meat once a day? If Ludwig had a _job_, that would be another story. Ludwig had relented. But talking about it must have made Gilbert hungry, for Gilbert told him to go out and buy a fish anyway, and gave him three quarters to do so. Ludwig was not going to argue with his brother's logic.

"Good day, Kiku," Ludwig had greeted when he arrived.

"Ludwig!" the small man returned warmly. He turned around from fixing the display of iced fishes in front of his little store. "I'm so glad you've returned. Please come inside. I have acquired a new document I could use your help with."

That would require a few minutes. "Do you not still have business to conduct?" Ludwig said, glancing behind him at the outside world.

"Forget that. I cannot find an intelligent tutor of such things in all of Chinatown. We'll sit over by the door so I can make sure no one steals anything. I assume you want a fish too?"

"Yes please."

"Same as last time? Flounder? No, you should take this one. It's the best one I have today."

Kiku darted outside and retrieved one of the specimens resting in the ice. It was not nearly as ugly a fish as last time's, it was green and sharklike, intelligent and streamlined, with gold glittering snakelike diamond scales. Neither of the Germans were picky, and Ludwig trusted Kiku's expertise. He nodded his approval. "How do you call it in English?"

"Walleye," Kiku informed. He placed it inside on a tray of snow. They seated themselves as Kiku spread a curling document before them. A sketch of some kind of old battleship adorned the paper.

"Certainly not modern." Ludwig took a closer look at the image. "American make. Twenty, thirty years old at least. It still has a crows nest, and the cannons are half the caliber of what we can put on ships today."

"Do you know why the ships arrange the cannons how they do?"

Ludwig shook his head. The question crossed from engineering into strategy, and no immediate answer approached him. "My brother Gilbert might know. He was a cadet in the war."

"Which war?"

Ludwig cocked his head in confusion. "_The War_, of course. What other war is there to talk about?"

_"Europeans,"_ Kiku sighed painfully, his brown irises sliding to the edge of his narrow eyes.

Ludwig blinked, unsure what to make of the reaction. Kiku quickly spoke again. "Do you think your brother could help me?"

"I do not think that is a wise idea," Ludwig voiced.

"Why not?"

"Gilbert, is.. he's…"

Selfish? Deceitful? Ignorant? Rude? Prejudiced? A smug unpredictable pompous bigot to anyone he has nothing to gain from?

"He is generally not well mannered to people he does not fear or respect," Ludwig said summarily. A poor dinner guest.

"Thus, is he rude to every stranger he meets?" Kiku asked doubtfully.

Ludwig tried to think of the few people he knew of Gilbert's interactions with. The Canadian, he was nice to him. But that was garnered because they depended on each other. And it was obvious from the carcasses dotting the barn that Matthew was a highly experienced killer. Then there came the gypsy woman. Gilbert seemed to have something with her, but she had near shot him dead, and loosened a few molars when she smashed him across the face with a pistol.

"You'd be better off becoming his friend by challenging him to a fight," Ludwig suggested.

"If that is the only way to tolerate him," Kiku said seriously. "If you are confident your brother will be disruptive when he comes, I will think of a way to entertain him."

Gilbert could likely beat his larger brother, and Kiku would not come up to Gilbert's lips! Such a statement was not meant to be taken seriously.

"I'll insist he behaves," Ludwig asserted. He didn't much like the thought of his friend and his brother arm wrestling across a plate of fish. Oh no. Too much of a mess. But Gilbert might come if there was food involved and his ego was stroked.

"Tonight at seven, you'll both come?"

"We don't have anything planned. Assume we are. I'll come back and tell you within the hour if Gilbert is busy." Busy legging booze or finding prostitutes or whatever Gilbert did on weeknights. Ludwig took the paper wrapped walleye and prepared to leave.

"I could teach you our way to prepare it, if you'd like. There must be something I can teach you in return," Kiku offered.

Ludwig laughed once. "Cooking lessons with me would be fruitless. Gilbert scarcely lets me near the stove."

Kiku closed his eyes and smiled wistfully. "You would not need a stove."

The air of the city was cool and his pace brisk. A few orange leaves spiraled emberlike across the rectangle of blue sky that stretched between the rows of buildings. Upon Ludwig's return to the tenement, Gilbert cracked an evil smile. "Beating up teenaged girls now, are we Ludwig?"

Ludwig deposited the fish on the table. He regarded his brother coolly. "At least I wasn't beating on something else."

Gilbert waved his hand and blew air out his lips, knowing he was defeated. "How'd such an honest boy grow such a devil's tongue."

"Probably your influence."

"Fair," Gilbert noted proudly to himself. Then, with the suggestive croon perhaps universal to older brothers, "She's pretty, ain't she, Ms. Lili."

"I _suppose,"_ Ludwig replied with the bored emotionless flatness he knew would annoy his brother.

"I forget," Gilbert responded with equal elegance. "Your boyfriend the fishmonger would stop giving you discounts, wouldn't he."

At Ludwig's purposeful silence, Gilbert snorted in triumph. He set two bottles of American pissbeer on the table, cut the fish, noted its difference, tossed Ludwig two potatoes to peel, lit the stove with his cigarette lighter, and began heating some oil in a pan. Gilbird cooed curiously from the other end of the room as the fire bloomed.

"Dearest Gilbird," Gilbert sang. In a few graceful steps the man had slid over to the wooden bird-rabbit hutch on the windowsill, and folded himself at the waist like a sideways L, his long straight nose near poking between the gaps in the bars. He stuck his finger in, which Gilbird nibbled testingly. Gilbert turned to Ludwig. "Do you think pigeons can eat fish?"

"Not sure. But since he is wounded, it is probably best he eats some meat."

After the men had eaten, Gilbert had cut a scrap of fillet as long as a bullet into very small shreds, wisely doubting Gilbird's tiny seed beak's ability to chew. He placed them on the tip of his finger, which he inserted into the bars. After deciding it was food, Gilbird pecked from them.

"Like everybody who lives in my house, you oughta work for your keep too," Gilbert told the bird as it ate.

"Pigeons are a domesticated species gone feral. Originally they were raised by humans for squab, eggs, and fertilizer, and brought to the new world with the French," Ludwig informed. He had started washing dishes.

"Well I ain't need your fertilizer and I sure as hell don't wanna eat ya and get your worms. So when you're better, you're gonna learn how to deliver my messages," Gilbert instructed the bird.

"New York street pigeons cannot be trained to deliver messages," Ludwig informed flatly.

"Could ya shut up for five seconds, thanks."

Ludwig shut up.

"Why can't he deliver my messages!" Gilbert bellowed to the silence. "Forget expensive telephone calls and telegrams, next time I meet Matthew, I give him the time and date _by pigeon!"_

"Only a certain type of pigeon, a homing pigeon, carries messages, and street pigeons do not have their developed navigational sense," Ludwig explained. "Two, pigeon messengers only work one way, if you wanted to send messages to Matthew, it would have to have been raised at Matthew's and he would have to give it to you, and it would think of Matthew's home as its roost to return to."

"So yer tellin me, no matter what, we can't train him to deliver messages?" Gilbert said defeatedly.

Ludwig frowned and shook his head. He turned his attention back to washing dishes.

"Pah!" Gilbert waved a hand dismissively. "What do you know anyway. What makes you the pigeon expert." Gilbert turned calmly to his pigeon and in a quiet voice soothed, "Worry not Gilbird. We'll find work for you yet."

Gilbird cocked its head, its glittering red eyes blinking once. When it concluded there was nothing more to eat, it shuffled its feet to face towards the sunlight, displaying its backside to the men, and began to tenderly preen its wing.

"Your Japanese friend knows his subject," Gilbert complimented, staring at his bare fingers.

"His name is Kiku. He actually expressed to me he wishes to meet you. Tonight."

"He told you this today? I wonder what made him learn German."

"He speaks none."

"How'd you make friends with him? He speaks English? Ludwig, I can't go over there with my second rate Denglisch. It would be disgraceful to our family name. I must stay home," Gilbert insisted.

If Ludwig were a less intelligent man, he might have said that being an unmarried expatriate at twenty-six and a petty criminal was shame on the Beilschmidt family already.

"I'll translate. He asked for you specifically, I told him you knew a little about the war."

"Half the German men I know fought in the war, and there's plenty of Americans here who know about it, why's he wanna to talk to me?

"He thought you could teach him something useful."

"Well, I_ am_ an especially clever man," Gilbert ceded, and it was decided then the two brothers would attend.

* * *

Kiku met the Germans in the threshold of his home. He smiled at Ludwig and then looked reverently to Gilbert. "You must be the Herr Beilschmidt I've heard so much about. An honor to meet you. Here they call me Kiku Honda." Kiku extended a hand.

"It pleases me," Gilbert parroted in English, shaking the hand. Kiku smiled and led them inside.

Different types of seafood and a few brightly colored vegetables on simple white clay plates dotted Kiku's small short rectangular wooden table. It was not a lot of food, but it was sufficient. The spread was absent of familiar starches outside white rice. Nowhere was there anything that resembled a potato or a sausage. But the cuisine did appear more labor intensive than Ludwig was used to, as they were almost artistically presented in repeating patterns, thin slices of meat arranged in layered rings like daisy petals, than the simple clumsy piles of food he was used to. Ludwig thought it admirable of Kiku to cook for them, especially since he worked all day and it did not seem he had a wife to help him.

Radiating from Gilbert Ludwig sensed an awkwardness. His brother certainly knew even less what to do with the unrecognizable food at a foreign stranger's apartment. Gilbert's manners could be well when he wanted them to be; their mother had been strict on it. But he expected his brother was likely to override such training as European norms continued to be broken. Ludwig imagined what Gilbert's frequent looks were trying to communicate.

HE'S NOT GONNA MAKE US EAT WITH THOSE LITTLE STICKS IS HE?

LUDWIG, THERE IS A TENTACLE ON MY PLATE AND IT STILL HAS THE SUCKERS ON IT

I THINK HE DID NOT COOK THIS AT ALL I SWEAR IT TWITCHED

Ludwig and Kiku discussed small things. Kiku's business. How Ludwig had walked a girl to school today. Gilbert seemed to be getting impatient of silently following the conversation. "Don't we have some war plans to talk about or something?" the elder whispered.

"Germans loathe smalltalk. The Japanese practice it as a diplomatic art," Ludwig explained to his brother. "Kiku will consider it rude to invite us and ask about battleships immediately."

"How unfortunate," Gilbert muttered, violently stabbing something with his fork.

"And please stop speaking German to me in front of Kiku, he is very sensitive. He will fear you are speaking poorly of him."

"Then you should not have invited me," Gilbert said loftily. "I know not another way to speak."

"Then just try to listen in. I don't think you are as bad as you think."

Gilbert began to mutter in his most brutish low German about how English was a difficult language, that he hated to keep being dragged into these things as the burdensome dinner guest, and that Kiku's food was fit for sharks to eat. Kiku looked at Gilbert concernedly.

"He stubbed his toe under the table," Ludwig covered.

"I apologize immensely. It has always been too low, I will fix the legs tomorrow," Kiku said with his usual politeness. Despite the flawless words, Ludwig was not convinced that Kiku actually intended to fix anything.

"What the devil is he going on about now?" Gilbert growled to his brother.

Kiku closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and looking directly at Gilbert, in a honeyed tone revealed his challenge. "Mr. Beilschmidt, Ludwig speaks highly of your abilities. I was wondering if after dinner you would be interested in sparring with me?"

Gilbert had paused, having heard his name, and keenly detecting the sudden veiled threat of the sentence's tone. Ludwig repeated the proposition to his brother in German, unsure how best to translate 'spar.'

"This a common practice in Japan? Challenge their dinner guests to duels?" Gilbert said snidely to his brother. Ludwig did not have time to answer. Gilbert's head swiveled threateningly to acknowledge Kiku directly in the eyes for the second time all night.

"You would like to fight? Why would you want to fight?" Gilbert asked with slow, deliberate, enunciated words. Ludwig translated the question and Kiku's answer. Gilbert slid his palms across the wood in front of him and stood.

"I've never backed down, we will fight," Gilbert declared calmly.

Kiku began calmly explaining the parameters of what he planned. Gilbert had managed to catch one of the first words the Japanese had said.

"Swords?" Gilbert repeated in English. "Deep dig you your grave, friend. Let us have it with swords."

"Not real swords. I hope a kendo shinai is acceptable, they're bamboo but about as heavy as a sword, I would not want anyone to receive injuries," Kiku said. Behind where Kiku sat, grinning lethally from the darkness above his head, arched the katana in the gloom.

Gilbert swiped his hands out at his sides. "Egal." Whatever.

Fire of guilt and anxiety laced through Ludwig's veins. A game of chess would have been sufficient, if they could find a board. Control had escaped the situation. Though lacking blades, the swords appeared heavy and flexible, and like a baseball bat easily able to crack ribs. He must warn Kiku that sparring with Gilbert was a poor idea. Fencing was another antiquated pre-war frivolity Prussian military fathers had insisted on teaching their firstborn sons.

There was hardly room inside for such a match. Fire laced the air and the men abandoned the table dirty. The market streets, bustling in the day, were deserted but for the stray automobile and prostitute at night.

A frown from Ludwig to Kiku served the German's warning that not everything was alright. Kiku did not react. Instead the Japanese distributed the thick brown bamboo pole to Gilbert. They stepped some ten paces apart. Kiku, facing Gilbert, raised his sword above his head, bent his knees and slowly lowered the weapon to point directly at Gilbert as he descended in a bow. Gilbert raised an eyebrow at the orientalness of it, but bowed subtly in the European way, his right forearm crossing his chest, the sword sweeping outward in his left.

Taught to fence in the manner of the pre-war aristocracy, or a lower-middle class Prussian army mimicry of it, Gilbert held the wood in his one hand. He faced perpendicular to his opponent, his silhouette narrow as a palm, leaving Kiku no spot to strike. He rested one arm behind his back and extended the bamboo towards Kiku. The shinai was wider, longer, and heavier than a sabre, and he saw the muscles of his forearm knotted with discreet effort. But Gilbert was larger and stronger than Kiku. The Japanese held his sword with two hands between his legs, and his feet slid into a wide horse stance.

Noting his opponent's defensive stance, Gilbert struck like a viper. His sword glided along the straight outstretched edge of Kiku's, and with a sudden sideways pressure broke Kiku's defense. His shinai off to his left and his chest exposed, the tip of Gilbert's sword cut across Kiku's collarbone towards his throat. A sudden crashing blow towards his head caused Gilbert to jump backwards mid attack. Kiku stormed forward, his strokes wide and sweeping, and while Gilbert was prompt to parry each one, his attempts to riposte them were superficial while having the strength of his one arm. But using only one arm, Gilbert easily outmaneuvered the slow steady footwork that balanced Kiku's every heavy strike. Gilbert's strike was swift enough that Kiku had no hope of ever dodging, but with a measured upwards stroke, the blows would be deflected in a thunderous cacophony of sharp noise. Neither of the blurring swords had yet struck a point-scoring head, chest, or throat.

Panting silently, the two men leaned forward, their swords quivering against each other, each too tired to strike, too determined to relent. But the stalemate was not a position Gilbert could maintain with one hand. With a sharp upward thrust he angled Kiku's sword away and danced backwards. Kiku bent a knee and swept his sword low, and a sideways stroke lashed just a foot off the cement to sweep Gilbert's agile feet out from under him. But Gilbert sprang to the side, pivoted behind his opponent, and raised the wood to smash down on Kiku's spine. Low on the ground, with the fear of life in his wide brown eyes, Kiku rolled once away and stood again two meters from Gilbert. Adrenalized, eyes alight with fury, Gilbert advanced, with his height and speed ruthlessly slashing at his opponent. Kiku blocked each one with a step backwards and the thunderous crack of wood on wood ricocheted like popping gunfire through the street.

Gilbert lunged forward and Kiku pushed him away with a shoulder. Kiku spiraled around Gilbert's sword, and thrust with sudden clarity outward. The tip of the shinai rested firmly between the twin peaks of Gilbert's sharp shirt collar, pressing into the hollow of his bone clavicle with an acute choking pressure. His white throat curved skyward, exposed, chin angled up away from the blade. Gilbert froze breathless and could only stare down his nose at Kiku, an inch away from spearing his jugular with a sword.

"Gilbert!" A female voice gasped. Ludwig's head turned towards the voice. One of the prostitute women recognized him. An evil grin split her cheeks.

"Get outta here, Nat," Gilbert growled, still frozen with the splintery sword point jammed under his Adam's apple. A delayed red tinge of fury or embarrassment appeared on his cheeks.

Cackling and singing, the silver haired woman trotted away under the streetlights, her flowing bluish hair flickering and darting like moonlight on a river.

"C'mon Lud let's get outta here before the cops come," Gilbert said gruffly. A darting step backwards freed his neck from Kiku, and strolling powerfully forward he bodily shoved his shinai into Kiku's free hand, which caused the smaller man to stumble backwards.

"Oh _no_, not yet! You'll help us with something first," Ludwig demanded.

Gilbert halted indignantly. "What did you just say to me?"

"Come back inside," Ludwig soothed, his tone strategically softer.

Crossly, but obediently, Gilbert followed Kiku back inside the shopfront home. He raised his chin as he walked, looking down at the world through his white eyelashes. But to Ludwig the position reminded him of having a sword pressed on his throat. Kiku assembled his materials once inside. A pair of scissors and a fish scaler were rolled out as paperweights and the ship print spanned the other table.

Gilbert squinted hostily at the diagram. "Why does he have this?"

"Educated people keep more in their dwellings than Pickelhauben and dying birds."

"And needy teenagers," Gilbert added.

Gilbert sat upon the stool directly in front of the document. Kiku and Ludwig stood on either side, peering over his shoulders like long-necked birds.

"I must thank you for agreeing to help, Mr. Beilschmidt. It truly is an honor to have someone as experienced in strategy as you. You see, in my country, we only have sailboats. I find the technology of the west simply fascinating."

"Total nerd," Gilbert muttered in German.

Ludwig looked toward his friend. Behind Kiku's eyes glittered a sly smile, the only vestige of a flaw in his act. The masterful performance, his flattering, humble, foreign submission around arrogant western men, who would deign to share information with the Japanese in no other fashion. Even after besting Gilbert in combat, he remained deferential. Ludwig noticed Kiku's skill in this necessary game, and admired his friend greatly for his cunning.

"What does he want to know?" Gilbert said curtly.

"Why are there no lifeboats on deck?" Ludwig said.

"It's a battleship, not the Titanic. If you're under attack a wooden lifeboat isn't going to help you. It will be on fire, clog the deck, and the captain will shoot you for launching it."

Ludwig translated to Kiku. "And the cannons? Why do they have a big one in the front, and tiny ones on the side?"

"If you're ever in a ship battle, you want to line your ship up to T the enemy. With your broadside with all of your cannons facing their bow. This way you maximize the weapons pointed at them, concentrate your target at the bridge, and they don't have as many guns to shoot at you. But they won't let you do that, they'll turn so the ships are parallel if they can. Anything else?"

Ludwig and Kiku looked at each other. Kiku's wide brown eyes showed he did not wish to overstay his luck. "I don't think so," Ludwig said.

Deciding they were finished, Gilbert seized his black peacoat, suspenders, and necktie from where he had shed them before the duel and dressed himself. Head lowered submissively, Ludwig stepped to follow his brother.

"Ludwig, wait please."

Ludwig halted. Gilbert did not.

"On Saturday, I am receiving some friends at sundown. I would be very pleased if you could attend," Kiku said.

"Naturally," Ludwig agreed. His studies were his job, and the hours quite flexible. "I shall be there."

"Excellent. Thank you for bringing your brother. I enjoyed having someone to spar with," Kiku said. "If we had used European swords, he would have won."

Ludwig laughed. "I'm sure he will remember it for the rest of his life. See you Saturday."

Gilbert was lighting a cigarette as he walked. He shielded the sparker with his hand from the wind, and managed to catch an ember on the tip of the white stick he held between his teeth. "Strange friend you've got," he said, taking it in his fingers.

"I would rather have strange friends than boring ones. Thank you for obliging Kiku's questions. I know he can be intense with them, but he only wants to learn our ways," Ludwig explained humbly.

Gilbert blew smoke out from the cigarette. "I lied to you about the ship."

Ludwig blinked incredulously. "How so?"

"Shooting a large blast from the side would unbalance the ship. But from the front, it only pushes the ship back a few meters. For this reason are the side cannons small. You would never expose your broadside to the enemy's bow in a T, as you have presented a large, defenseless target to their strongest gun."

Ludwig was furious. Kiku would surely realize this, Gilbert had made him look like a fool in front of one his only friends. "Why have you lied to me?!"

"I don't think you should be spending time with him anymore."

"Why? Because Kiku beat you at fencing?" Ludwig's voice was rising.

"Because. I think he is a spy for the imperial Japanese," Gilbert responded with calm severity.

"Impossible."

"What he asks about. It's strictly for modern machinery. What they don't have in Japan."

"He's a decent, intelligent, human being!" Ludwig defended.

"I'm not insulting his character. I'm saying he's dangerous to be around for when he gets caught."

"What," Ludwig scoffed. "They'll interrogate me with my blond hair and blue eyes for being a Japanese spy too?"

"No, but maybe a German one."

"No..." Ludwig trailed.

"Changes are coming, Ludwig. And I don't think the States and Germany will get along as favorably as they have the last five years. I don't care about drinking, but best you don't get into political trouble."

Ludwig contemplated this. "I'll ask him next time. What he's really doing."

* * *

**Author's Note:**

**Ludwig references the German dual education system, in which high school aged students are separated into two groups. Those who will take on an apprenticeship and master a trade, and those who will go on to university. Lili references American racial segregation in schools.**

**Thank you all for waiting so long. I'm getting older and trying to figure out how to be a fake adult. I realize part of the time problem is I don't give myself writing deadlines. And since I don't, I just wait around for a random lighting strike inspiration moment to come and fix the problems with the chapter. Which usually doesn't come.**

**I cut this chapter shorter than the 8,000 monstrosity I intended. It would have taken me another few months to integrate the next content given my pace. So rest assured the next chapter has progress (which I always include on my profile). I would probably be better off releasing more frequent, shorter chapters in the future. That's what I did with FotV.**

**Feedback and realizing people actually read this does motive me to continue, though.**

**Steadfast,**

**Celtic**


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